by Ilana Masad
“I found Mom’s will yesterday. She left you her wedding and engagement rings. Guess she wants you to get hitched.”
Ariel looks stunned, but he follows her to Iris and Peter’s bedroom. The rings are on the vanity, where Iris left them since menopause made her fingers swell and they became uncomfortable. Ariel picks them up and puts them down at once, like they’re hot. “What am I supposed to do with these?” he murmurs.
“Keep them somewhere safe. You might want them someday.” Maybe I do know something, Maggie thinks. Her detachment surprises her, this feeling of adulthood, as if losing a parent was something she’s been readying for since turning eighteen and leaving home. It isn’t, though. Nothing has really prepared her for this—Iris wasn’t sick, she wasn’t that old, she was just . . . Mom. Mom doing her thing far away while Maggie lived her life in St. Louis, not all that different, if she’s honest, than Mom doing her thing while Maggie was in grade school, middle school, high school. It doesn’t feel real yet, even though she’s carried her mother’s body on her shoulders, maybe because Iris not being in the house isn’t all that strange. A story Peter finds funny—or did, when he was coherent—was how Maggie asked him, when she was four or five, where Mommy lived. It’s funny only because the day she asked that, Iris, who was pregnant with Ariel, was ordered on bed rest for the next few months. Maggie remembers running to her parents’ room after kindergarten during that time, hoping her mother would be awake so they could cuddle and watch whatever old police procedurals were rerunning on the couple of channels that didn’t play daytime soaps, which Iris didn’t like.
Ariel moves the rings around the blond wooden surface of the vanity, making them shush and clink. “What about you?” he asks, and picks them up again, the engagement one with its small pink diamond in one hand, the plain gold band in the other. He thrusts the hands forward as if offering them to Maggie.
“She left me her amber necklace,” she says.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, remember that one she wore whenever she went out of town? I don’t know, man. Fucking whatever,” she says, trying to shake off the slight, and recalls something. “And there’s also letters we’re supposed to mail, apparently?” She points at the facedown stack on the floor.
“Okay, well, I think I’m going to go call Leona,” Ariel says. “I mean,” he pauses, half-turned away from her already, “do you need me? It’s just like, sticking them in the mail, right?” Maggie nods that she can handle it and lets him go. She doesn’t need him, not if he doesn’t want to be there.
Having something to do feels better than not, so she decides she’ll take a walk to wherever there’s a mailbox. Her legs are stiff from standing in place, shifting from foot to foot most of the day, and it feels like she hasn’t really moved in days. She kneels on the floor and flips the letters over, looks at the names on them.
KARL JELEN
ABRAHAM K. OKAFOR
LIAM AINSWORTH
HAROLD LAKE BROOKS
ERIC BAISHAN
Who are these people? Maggie hasn’t heard of any of them, never heard her mother mention them. Were any of them at the funeral? Were they clients? Friends? She finds her mother’s Filofax again and flips to the address book at the back. Next to the names of her work-related contacts, Iris wrote their roles: caterer, photographer, client, manager, concierge, and so on. But these men, when Maggie finds them, aren’t designated as anything, so they’re social contacts, not professional.
“Huh,” she says aloud into the empty room. She wants to ask Ariel if he’s heard of them but can hear him talking to Leona through his closed door. Peter is still asleep, or pretending, in the living room.
She takes the letters outside with her and sits down to roll herself a joint, even though she’s reached peak high. The float in her head just feels normal now, not really a relief anymore. It’s as if there’s a threshold, a point beyond which she simply can’t get more fucked up. This is partly why she prefers it to alcohol—booze has no real limit, and the couple of times she’s blacked out were awful. The first time was when she was in high school, after prom, which she’d gone to dressed in an ill-fitting secondhand suit she’d found at a vintage shop. The knees of the pants were ripped, purposefully she suspected, and held together with ancient safety pins that seemed rusted shut, and Iris had hated it, asking Maggie why she was bothering at all if she thought the whole thing was a mockery. It was one of their big fights. When Maggie woke up the next morning in her room with no memory of how she got there, she was wearing only her underwear and the dress shirt, which was stained with something that smelled awful. When she made a muffled noise at the ache in her head, Peter popped in to tell her Iris had put her to bed when she’d stumbled in at two in the morning, and then he went to get ice water and a bucket, which Maggie used liberally over the next two hours. She’d expected Iris to crow about it, but her mother seemed to think that puking six times was punishment enough.
Maggie licks the end of the rolling paper and seals the joint, which is thin and crooked but there’s no one around to prove herself to. She lights it, inhales, and looks at the letters again.
Four of the addresses are in California, and one is in Las Vegas. She pulls out her phone and begins googling them.
It corrects Jelen to Jelenic at first. When she fixes that, she still finds nothing, really. No Facebook profile, one Google+ account with four followers and zero posts. Abraham K. Okafor finds pictures of basketball players, though she assumes that’s just Google racially profiling, since there aren’t any players with that exact name. She does find a doctor with the last name Okafor but in Florida, and his first name doesn’t match. Liam Ainsworth brings up an actor who looks about twenty who’s appeared in several movies she’s never heard of. His Twitter puts him in Manchester, the one in the UK, and besides, she can’t imagine her mother having anything to do with a One Direction lookalike. There are several dead Harold Lakes and one dead Harold Brooks, but she has no idea if any of them are the right one. Eric Baishan finds her absolutely nothing relevant, but his address is different from the others. Before the name is ATTN and it appears the letter is addressed to a company, DRAKE & CARDINAL, in Los Angeles, which is also where Karl Jelen’s address is. Okafor is in Sacramento, Ainsworth in Las Vegas. Brooks just has a PO box number in somewhere called Palo Verde, California.
Later, Maggie won’t remember how it happened, how she found herself in her bedroom, piling the things she’d scattered back into her suitcase. She won’t remember the leap of excitement in her stomach at the plan forming in her mind, a plan that will get her out and away from the eerie house her mother will never return to—because, no matter how often Iris was gone, Maggie always knew that she would be coming home soon, and this will never again be true. Maggie won’t remember ignoring a call from Lucia, too scared that if she picked up and told Lucia about it, she’d chicken out or be convinced that she should stay and do her duty. She won’t remember thinking that it’ll serve them right, Peter especially, that he should be forced to deal with the half-strangers showing up to the shiva. But in the moment, as she keeps moving the stack of letters around the room while she packs, as if they might disappear, as if she might lose her excuse to get the fuck out of there—in the moment, she’s a jumble of nerves, her hands shaking as she tells herself that this is the right thing to do. That she needs to know what these letters are about. That Iris owes her this much after giving the rings to Ariel. That, strangely, she owes this to Iris, no matter how mad she is, because a will is a kind of last request. She finds the amber necklace in her jeans pocket from yesterday and tucks it into a small zipped compartment inside her backpack.
Once she gets her toothbrush from the bathroom and locates her deodorant, which rolled under the bed, she dashes to the living room.
“Dad, I’m—”
She stops short as she turns the corner. Her father is lying on the floor in the middle o
f the room, curled up like a child, holding something to his face and wracking with quiet sobs that make his back jump and shake. Maggie kneels down beside him. “Dad,” she whispers. The cloth clutched between Peter’s hands is Iris’s sweater, the one that was still on the couch yesterday. He must have noticed it when he got up from his sleep. “Daddy, oh, Daddy.” She lies behind him and spoons him. She’s never been his big spoon before.
When she was nine, almost ten, after Columbine, there was a while when she was so scared of what might happen in her school that she stayed up most of every night worrying about it, and got on the yellow bus every morning exhausted. When she nodded off in class one day, she was sent to the principal. She had never gotten in trouble in school before, ever, and as nervous as she was about what would be said in the office, she was more concerned with what the principal would tell her parents. Ms. Fermina ended up treating her kindly, but she called Peter to come and take Maggie home, and told him what had happened.
He wasn’t mad, but he wanted to know why she was so tired. Maggie didn’t want to tell him at first, but eventually he broke her down with a stop at the frozen yogurt place she loved because they had green sprinkles that reminded her of the slime from Nickelodeon. That night, Peter climbed into bed with her, and spooned her, and sang her the lullaby he’d been singing her since she could remember herself:
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,
Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird,
And if that mockingbird don’t sing,
Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring . . .
It helped, though it took another couple of weeks of Peter staying with her, cuddling and singing, before she was able to fall asleep on her own again.
And now here she is, spooning her tall father with his softened body and thin, receding hair, as he cries into her dead mother’s sweater.
She manages to get him up, makes him drink a glass of milk warmed in the microwave—another trick he used to calm her when she was little—and tries to get him to bed. He won’t sleep in his bedroom, though, so she settles him in his office, on the chaise, and brings him his dorky pajamas, the 1950s kind with buttons and piping and everything. He holds them in his hands like he doesn’t know what to do with them, but she’s not going to help him get dressed. It feels like one step too far, and besides, he’s not actually physically feeble. So she leaves him there and goes back to her room, to her packed bag.
She can’t do this, can she? But the thought of another day talking to people she doesn’t know, who barely knew her mother, chaperoning Ariel into being social and moving her zombie of a father around . . . It’s unbearable.
She definitely shouldn’t drive yet, though, she realizes. She’ll nap, write a note, then go.
IRIS
JUNE 2, 2013
Iris rarely considered her death a real possibility, perhaps because she spent much of her life making sure to avoid it. It was one reason she read detective novels, crime novels, all the literature she could get her hands on that explored the bloodiness and depravity and confusion of the worst of human nature. By being aware of it, of all its infinite—if predictable, as she discovered over the years as she devoured more and more such books—possibilities, Iris was able to feel in control. In restaurants, she sat with her back against the wall or at a corner table far from the windows. During air travel, she sat behind the wing, even when she could afford the occasional business-class seat, because she’d read that you have more chance of surviving a crash in the back half of the plane. If she’d ever needed to take a long bus ride, she was sure she would have looked for the seat belts. She drove carefully, never more than five miles above the speed limit. She double-locked motel and hotel room doors, added the chain if it was there. And, because she wasn’t one to dismiss harmless superstition, she wore her amber necklace, handed down from her mother, whenever she had to travel farther than a five-mile radius from her home.
But soon after Iris turned fifty-nine, she had a fall. That’s all it was. A fall. She was walking along Abbot Kinney in Venice, where she’d just met a prospective client for lunch, and was pretty certain she was going to get the job. It had been a nice meal, perfectly pleasant. She and the prospect, the owner of a chain of coworking spaces, discovered they’d both gone to the same temple back when she lived in LA and might have crossed paths. He knew her friend Dena—not well, but he liked her; she’d recommended a decorator that he and his wife ended up using—and they had fun playing Jewish geography, trying to see who else they might both know, whether they’d lived near each other or had relatives who did. She wanted the assignment, even though it meant going up to Sacramento a few times, which would be sad.
When they finished, the prospective client insisted on paying, implied she’d probably be charging him expenses soon anyway, and shook her hand before handing his ticket to the valet. Iris had found parking on the street, and she walked toward her car, hoping there wouldn’t be unexpected traffic on her way home.
And then she fell.
It was a tiny jut in the sidewalk that tripped her, and she only got a small run in the pantyhose she was wearing. Her hands were a little scraped, stinging without bleeding. But the moment in which the concrete rushed toward her had felt endless, and her body’s reaction hadn’t been instantaneous like she was certain it should be, like she was sure it once was. Instead, her body froze, her reactions slowed, and she thought she was about to die.
“Lady, are you okay?” A white guy with dreadlocks had a hold of her elbow and helped her up. He was her height, but he seemed to be gazing down at her, and she imagined how he must see her, as a middle-aged—no, probably old, if she was being honest—woman, silver-streaked hair, frail, even though she never pictured herself this way, never felt this way. “Ma’am?” he pressed, looking concerned, if stoned, and when she said she was fine and thanked him, he nodded and said, “Well, be careful, yo,” and walked away, his dreads swinging behind him as he approximated a sloped and sideways walk. She thought of Abe, of the stories he told her about his son and their bickering over things like cultural appropriation in fashion, Abe rolling his eyes and saying that there were more important things in the world than white guys wearing dreads, his son trying to tell him that wasn’t the point, that many things could be important at once. She’d never mentioned it to Abe, but whenever he talked about his son, she thought the teenager would get along with Maggie. They seemed to share an indignation with the world that she couldn’t muster in the same way anymore. She missed Abe. She wondered if she’d ever conveyed how grateful she was to him and how much she appreciated their time together.
She missed all of them, really, all the important ones, except Shlomo, of course. She fiercely missed Peter in that moment after the fall, and made herself start moving again so she could get to the car and back home to him. Her body was stiff, as if still seizing up on the way down. Nothing had happened to her, but she felt like something had changed, irrevocably. She was faced with the fact that her body wasn’t going to be getting stronger. She should be getting more calcium. She should get a bone-density test. A physical. She’d been neglecting herself for years, thinking she was going to last forever on sheer willpower. This small fall, a stumble, an uncharacteristic slip in her never-before-clumsy life, reminded her she was mortal and aging.
In the car on the way home she tried to calm herself. After all, she’d had some existential moments when she started going through menopause years ago. But mostly she’d been worried about her sense of desire back then, concerned that with her hormonal changes she would also feel less of the lifelike substance that was her sexuality. She’d been relieved to find that while certain bodily functions worked less vividly than they used to—for the first time in her life she’d begun using lubricating substances besides condoms—her desire remained. Now, she didn’t even care about her desire, the fear coursing through her instead entirely devoted to the time she had left on ear
th.
On a whim, while stuck in traffic on the 101, she tried calling her daughter, but the call went to voice mail and she realized it was almost four in St. Louis and Maggie would be working. Ariel was on a weeklong trip with some buddies of his, attending an amateur Magic: The Gathering tournament, and she’d see Peter soon enough. She called Maggie again and left her a message.
“Hello darling, it’s Mom,” she began in her singsong phone voice. “I just wanted to see how you are.” She considered telling Maggie that she’d fallen, but decided against it. What else could she say, though? “Oh, and I watched the first part of that documentary you recommended, about the West Memphis Three, and you know, those boys really were railroaded, weren’t they? Imagine if someone had seen how you dressed in high school and decided that meant you’d done something terrible! Anyway, I’m rambling. Stuck in traffic. I’m sure you never miss that in Mizzerah.” She slurred the word the way Maggie did when she was making fun of the local accent. “Anyway, love you, bye! It’s Mom, if I didn’t say before. Okay,” and she hung up.
She wondered, sometimes, why talking to Ariel always seemed easier. They had more in common, she supposed, in that they were avid readers and could talk about books for hours; they read wildly different genres, usually, but would occasionally read one of the other’s favorites so they could talk about it. But it wasn’t just that; it was something to do with privacy, maybe. Ariel was the one with the lock on his door, but Maggie’s heart and mind were closed books, and she was independent enough not to open them unless she wanted to. Iris envied her daughter, sometimes, for being able to seize at her own strength so soon, so young—she’d started insisting on wearing what she wanted to nursery school when she was four; she’d told Iris firmly that she had no interest in ballet when she was seven; she’d come out to friends at school before telling her parents. Mostly, Iris was proud, of Maggie and a little bit of herself for managing to raise her to be this person. She wasn’t sure her daughter recognized their similarities, or how lucky she was to have had her independence encouraged, but it didn’t really matter. If Maggie were to ever have a child of her own, surely she’d set a good example in other ways and also not receive credit for it. Iris wasn’t sure she would—as far as she knew, Maggie wasn’t interested. And if she was, well . . . Iris couldn’t help but worry about a child raised without a father. She could almost hear Maggie yelling at her just at the thought.
