by Sally Koslow
While simple-hearted neighbors
Chat of the “Early dead”—
We—prone to periphrasis,
Remark that Birds have fled!
After a moment, Brie goes on. “Molly sometimes forgot to eat, yet she had more energy than anyone I know. She was always begging me to go on long bike rides. Just last Saturday, she picked me up with Annabel in her bike seat and insisted we pedal over the Brooklyn Bridge to go to this diner….” Another memory is of us getting lost on a mountain trail in Aspen. I wonder if people aren’t now thinking of me as an extremely dumb jock.
“We have one last speaker,” Rabbi S.S. says. “Representing the Divine family … Lucy?”
No one ever took the two of us for sisters. We were fraternal twins, though I wondered why there wasn’t a more apt term. At our bat mitzvah, Lucy towered over me by eight inches and outweighed me by forty pounds. Everyone clucked about how awful it must be that I hadn’t gone through puberty yet, when Lucy had bazooms. But I know she hated looking at me in my mini, and I just thought she was fat. Envy spiced our relationship like a red hot chili pepper, and most of it came from Luce. I got married, while every relationship she’s had has ended—often with a guy moving to another continent with no forwarding address. I had a child. She wants one, desperately. People misunderstand Lucy. She wasn’t an easy sister, but I adored her.
“When Molly and I were five,” she says, “she convinced me that broccoli was an animal, and that my real name was Moosey. We were Molly and Moosey.”
Her timing is good. The congregation laughs. I am sorry I saddled her with that name, which stuck until she left for college—she got into Brown—and probably cost my parents twenty thousand dollars in therapy bills. Lucy rambles and shares too many anecdotes from seventh grade. Mourners check BlackBerrys. “I will tell you one thing,” she concludes. “We will find out who did this to my sister, Molly. If you are out there, the Divine family will hunt you down.” My sister sounds as if she is giving a speech on the eve of a doomed election.
People snap back to attention. The rabbi does not like Lucy’s tone any more than the buzz of conversation that has trashed the decorum of his service. He rushes over to Lucy, who shoots him the fierce look that scared away her last five boyfriends. She stares down Barry. He won’t meet her eye.
“Interment will be private,” the rabbi says quickly, “but shiva will begin tonight at the Marx home.” He announces our address and then, suddenly, a stranger with an unmistakable Barry-crafted nose breaks out in song. Accompanied by the synagogue’s turbo organ, her volume crescendos. “I could fly higher than an eagle,” she sings, knowing that the Upper West Side is the closest she will get to Broadway, “for you are the wind beneath my wings.”
I am mortified. Thank God I am in a box. Every one of my true friends—there have got be at least sixty in the room—as well as my parents, sister, and aunts and uncles are embarrassed by this ignominious display. Is this song Barry’s idea of a joke? Or Kitty’s?
Kill me. Kill me now.
Two
JUST. LIKE. THAT.
don’t know if I am dead or alive. I remember little. The spires of Riverside Church. Pain everywhere. A long, bottomless blackness.
This wasn’t the way I’d planned it. My bike? Where did it go?
I hear the river, steady, like a pulse. Instinctively, I count the waves, which match my weakly pounding heart. One, two, three … forty-eight, forty-nine … one hundred one, one hundred two.
Cold.
Cold.
Cold.
Snow falls. Flakes cover my face.
So.
Damn.
Cold.
I am still wearing one biking glove, shredded and streaked with blood, which exposes my frostbitten fingers.
Never.
Been.
This.
Cold.
Nev—
With the wisp of a shallow exhale, I am gone. A leaf blowing away, an ash falling off a cigarette, a dewdrop evaporating on a flower petal.
Just.
Like.
That.
No.
Big.
Deal.
I have watched too many bad movies. There is no traveling down a tunnel with an eerie white light, harps and—on the other side-clouds like Provence crème. I have crossed over, but there is just darkness and the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway.
Dawn arrives. Not ten feet from where I lie, under the tangle of bushes between the rock-bordered Hudson and the bike path, I begin to hear runners. This time of year, at this hour, they pass infrequently and keep their gazes straight ahead, because this is not Central Park, a social watering hole. The path is lonely and narrow. “Only an idiot would jog here,” Barry said once to a friend who boasted about the purity of running by the river. “I don’t know why you ride your bike there, either,” he added, turning to me.
It was one of my favorite short trips, up to the George Washington Bridge, where a little red lighthouse still keeps guard on a tiny spit of land in its vast shadow—for me, a small, private holy place. I loved reading the little red lighthouse book to Annabel, just as I loved when my mother had read it to Lucy and me.
The runners continue, and then I hear her voice. “Oh my God,” she says, barely audible, and then she yells the same words. Her footsteps grow closer. Above my legs stands a woman in tight black running pants and a loose parka. She removes an iPod earbud. “Are you alive?” she shouts to me. “Are you alive?” She tries, unsuccessfully, to push away brambles that cover the upper half of my body as she bleats those words again and again.
Her voice is trapped in her throat, as if she were screaming in a dream. She takes out a cell phone, pulls off her gloves, and punches in 911.
“I’m in Riverside Park,” she says between heaving breaths. “There’s a woman here—and I’m not sure if she’s … alive.”
I learn that my angel’s name is actually Angela, a grad student in philosophy at Columbia. I am sorry because I know that for the rest of her life she will carry the hideous image of how I looked in death.
When the police and paramedics arrive, they determine that I have been dead for several hours. There is no record, they say later, that I was reported missing.
Three
A GATED COMMUNITY
admit it. I am being buried in New Jersey, land of big-box discount stores, earsplitting accents, and oil refineries. The garden state? C’mon.
My parents wanted me flown back to Chicago to rest happily ever after next to Nana Phyllis and Papa Louie. Kitty was fine with the idea of shipping me off like a camp trunk. At the end of the day, so to speak, she probably wants a berth by her only son—the next best thing to a double bed. But Barry vetoed Chicago. “Molly’s a Marx,” he declared. “She belongs in the family plot.”
There was, however, a glitch: only one more Marx could squeeze into the real estate in Beth David Cemetery, within earshot of the Belmont Park racetrack, where Barry’s father and grandparents were laid to rest. So, faster than he chose his last laptop, Barry bought into a truly gated community, my new home away from home, Serenity Haven. I will, forever, be only six exits away from Ikea. A shame I don’t need any furniture, because I have plenty of time to decipher the directions.
Outside the synagogue, a cold rain starts to fall. Most of the mourners scatter back into their lives: jobs, lunch dates, toddlers to collect after nursery school. Three limousines gridlock in front of the building’s entrance. Barry, Annabel, and Kitty pile into one. My parents and Lucy fill the next. Second-tier Marxes and Divines crowd the third. Isadora and Brie streak away in a blur of British racing green Jaguar, while at least twenty less-distinguished cars packed with friends, neighbors, cousins, and colleagues follow the hearse.
Though it is only eleven-thirty, headlights glow through the drizzle. I feel like a drum majorette from the Chippewa Valley High School marching band, which we watched at the Thanksgiving Day parade a lit
tle over two months ago surrounded by a large, loud group in our own living room, with its Central Park West view. On account of Barry’s vodka-heavy Bloody Marys—not, I suspect, Big Bird—few guests ever refused our annual invitation.
A familiar khaki-colored Jeep joins the halting procession of cars but abruptly exits the Henry Hudson Parkway at 125th Street. Did the driver simply lose his nerve or did he suddenly get the yen to shop at Fairway? If that’s the case, I hope he’s buying the makings for a nourishing soup thick with root vegetables. I believe he’s in need of comfort.
It might have seemed odd if Luke had stuck with the entourage, odd to everyone but me. I would have liked him there, with his black overcoat flapping against his long legs, the pale blue cashmere scarf I gave him for his birthday tied around his neck, mirroring the color of his eyes and still smelling faintly of my perfume. Would he have cried? Cursed in silence? Introduced himself to my parents? Barry? Pulled Annabel to his chest and wept? How would he have explained himself? Too many questions.
Perhaps it’s just as well he’s not here, because we have arrived at the cemetery. The graveside service is abbreviated yet unbearable. Annabel hides her face against Barry’s hip. My parents—suddenly looking ten years older than the sixty-two they turned last year—lean on each other and Lucy like fragile plants whose roots have grown together for support. The gravediggers struggle as they center my casket. I am having trouble centering as well. I focus on the grimy granite bench nearby and wonder if Barry and Annabel will ever return to sit on it and talk to me. Or will Barry come alone? Will he apologize—or find a reason to complain?
There are prayers in both Hebrew and English. Then I hear it, the thud. Like a bomb, a shovelful of dirt wallops the top of the casket. Barry, the envy of every thirty-eight-year-old at the gym, pitches the earth with athletic zeal. My parents go next. At intervals of about a half minute, I feel tremors. Lucy brings Annabel to the grave and, with my daughter’s tiny, purple-mittened hands atop hers, which are bare and raw, they sprinkle a handful of gravelly Jersey mud that lands above my left shoulder, the one that didn’t break. Brie and Isadora approach the casket and hold each other around their narrow waists as they do the same. Kitty stands back, her head tilted down. At the end of the line, some of the others walk tentatively to the casket and dump in a shovelful. Unfamiliar with my religion’s ritual, they look shocked when, as if on cue, every member of the tribe suddenly chokes up ten seconds into the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Yeetgadal v’yeetkadash sh’mey rabbah … The foreign yet familiar words of finality pierce my flesh. This spiritual punctuation is for me, Molly Divine Marx.
Aleynu v’al kohl yisrael v’eemru. The Kaddish is over. Amein. Barry bellies back up to the grave and with the help of the Serenity Haven hunks blankets my casket with dirt until it is fully covered. Never again will I complain about lack of privacy.
“I’m starving,” I hear someone say. In the English translation, I believe this is the last line of the Kaddish.
“There’ll be a spread at Molly and Barry’s.” A voice repeats our address.
“From Zabar’s?”
“Barney Greengrass.”
“Even better. See you there?”
The mourners disperse, leaving me behind. I wonder how many will do a little shopping on Route 4 on their way back to Manhattan.
Four
SWIMMING WITH THE NOVA
arry and I moved into our apartment four years ago, when I was seven months pregnant with Annabel. Until then, we rented the dollhouse-sized one-bedroom on Jane Street that I’d found the year before we got engaged. In the back of a brownstone, the apartment overlooked the owner’s garden, and from our kitchen you could see a crab apple tree blooming in May and in the winter squirrels gathering black walnuts. Usually I was behind schedule—organization never being my strong suit—but once in a while, before I left for work, I made time for a scone with bitter orange marmalade washed down with Earl Grey and let myself imagine I lived in London.
I would have been content to stay in this cozy nook and keep our baby in a cradle next to the bed. But Kitty insisted that it would be “disadvantageous” for Barry’s practice if potential patients thought we couldn’t afford a larger place. Word would get around—plastic surgery candidates research. Neither Barry nor I was drawn to the suburbs, and bigger apartments were hard to come by in the Village. Despite the fact that few of my magazine friends lived above Fourteenth Street, Kitty—who was lending us two-thirds of the down payment—declared SoHo and Tribeca to be Sodom and Gomorrah, the East Village Siberia, and the complete borough of Brooklyn junkie heaven, even though real estate prices were through the roof. Which is how we landed uptown. Barry wanted the East Side, to be near girls’ schools, he said, though I suspected his mother on Park and Seventy-sixth was the real draw. Rather irritably, I told him I’d never be old enough for that neighborhood, although I loved gawking at Madison Avenue’s windows as much as the next woman. If we were to live uptown, I saw myself on Riverside Drive, which to me is—next to the Village—as British as Manhattan comes.
We settled on Central Park West, an East Side-style street that leapfrogged west of the park, in the kind of building where on Wednesday every owner receives the New York Review of Books. I tried to talk Barry into letting me create a neo-Victorian fantasy. I fell in love with a paint shade called Grape Thistle, wallpaper that mimicked damask, and a stuffed peacock perched inside an iron aviary six feet tall. In our classic six—two big bedrooms with a Lilliputian room off the kitchen where Delfina, our nanny, slept—I wanted worn, Turkish rugs, leather-bound Jane Austens, and tattered footstools. Maybe an English spaniel I’d name Camilla. I longed to walk through my front door and shake off the twenty-first century. I shared my vision with Barry.
“Where will I put a plasma TV?” he asked. “Molly, are you nuts? I’ll never be old enough for an apartment that looks like what you’re describing. I can practically feel my asthma kicking in from the dust.” With a look you’d offer a closely related lunatic, he pulled me toward him. “Must be the pregnancy hormones. It’s okay, honey.”
I pushed him away and ran out of the room, slamming a door behind me, my fantasy shattered like bone china hurled down a staircase. I could be dramatic.
Again, we negotiated, which in decorating is no different than it is in anything else—nobody gets what he or she wants. Our capacious kitchen looks as if it belongs in New Canaan, Connecticut, with glass-fronted, white-lacquered, nickel-latched cabinets, the home for an undistinguished collection of blue-and-white transferware bowls and platters. The countertops are creamy marble, which immediately became stained by red wine. To Kitty’s horror, I painted the old wood floor shiny cobalt, like the ocean in The Little Mermaid. When she saw it she said, “Why don’t you work with my decorator?” using a tone that demonstrated, for her, considerable restraint. “My treat, darling,” she added, which translated to “No taste, moron.”
“Because I’m a decorating editor, Kitty,” I reminded her. This never impressed my mother-in-law.
Except for Barry’s dumbbells, which I invariably tripped over on the way to the bathroom at night, I rather like our bedroom; it has a spindly-legged secretary desk and no fewer than five different muted flowered prints, all from vintage fabric I found while on a photo shoot in a Portobello Road shop. Annabel’s bedroom is baby-chick yellow, with a green velvet upholstered rocking chair in the corner next to a bookshelf whose marquee items include Eloise, my mother’s copy of The Secret Garden, and every other book a small girl might have read before Dora the Explorer. But the rest of the place is spare and bare. Modern or soulless, take your pick.
Barry got his monster television, which rules the room where I would have liked a mellow, scratched dining table with leaves meant for many large dinner parties. Instead, the table, which seats only six, is glass and steel, and in front of the TV is a pair of recliners. The leather couches are butch enough for a buckaroo. I will say I love the fact that a few moody black-
and-white photographs hang on the walls and there are several examples of art pottery, although I can’t tell Weller from Roseville to save my life, an expression I just realized I’d best retire.
I’m being snide about the apartment, which is a lot more luxurious than most city dwellers’. I wish I could say I wasn’t occasionally petty, but if I can’t be honest now, then when? I had flaws. I liked to gossip. I didn’t always rejoice at others’ successes. I occasionally forgot birthdays and relied too much on takeout food. I IM’d at Mommy and Me classes. I never voted in primaries and ate dark chocolate every day far in excess of the 6.3 grams that might have lowered my blood pressure. I don’t even know how much 6.3 grams are. And I should have lost five pounds. Okay, eight. I let the New York Times accumulate unread, especially the Science section, and I never opened Circuits, not once. I failed to polish my shoes, which I allowed to run down at the heels. I didn’t wash my hairbrushes and sometimes went to bed without removing my makeup. E-mail chain letters terminated on my watch, and I never looked at friends’ Internet photo galleries. I subscribed to two cheesy celebrity magazines. Unless my parents were visiting, on Friday nights I preferred to go to the movies and gorge on a tub of popcorn for dinner instead of making a proper Shabbat meal with a roast chicken and challah. I could never complete a crossword puzzle (not even the easy one on Monday), play Internet Scrabble, or understand football. My abs were going to hell because I did crunches only sporadically. I hated opera and spin classes. In whodunit movies, I could never follow the plot, even when someone explained it to me afterward as if I were in third grade.
I could have been a better wife. The problems in our marriage were as much my fault as Barry’s. To piss him off, I have been known to force myself not to laugh at his jokes, which were frequently the pee-in-your-pants kind our friends quoted for years. I used too much witless detail when I told him a story. I only gave my husband a blow job every few months.
