by Marion Winik
When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush. They revisit the spot for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting.
—Charles Siebert
Contents
Author’s Note
The Eye Doctor
The Neighbor
The Virgin
The Big Sister
The Painter
The Jeweler
The Carpenter
The Art Star
The Junkie
The Showgirl
The Driving Instructor
The Young Uncle
The Mah Jongg Player
The Queen of New Jersey
The Golf Pro
The Second Cousin Once Removed
The Publisher
The Clown
The Humanoid from Houston
The Skater
Three Lost Boys
The Photographer
The Bon Vivant
The Counselor
The King of the Condo
The Texan
The Democrat
The Wunderkind
The Dentist
The Second-Grade Teacher
The Realtor
The Competition
The Quiet Guy
The Man of Letters
The Bad Brother
The Little Brother
The Conscientious Objector
The Last Brother
The Last Straw
The Bad Influence
The Burning Man
The R.A.
The Graduate
The House
The Soldier
The Family Guy
The Baby
The Maid
The Sikh
The Nurse
The VIP Lounge
Author’s Note
I GOT THE IDEA to make a series of portraits of dead people I have known, or whose lives have touched me in some way, during a workshop taught by the novelist Jane McCafferty in January of 2007. She gave a writing assignment based on Stephen Dunn’s lovely poem “Tenderness,” in which the narrator remembers a woman he knew long ago.
This made me think of The Jeweler, who had passed through my life decades earlier. I scribbled down some lines about him, his paintings, and his mangos, then recalled the circumstances of his death, about which I had heard secondhand. At the same time, I felt my brain begin to crowd up, as if tickets to a show had just gone on sale and all my ghosts were screeching up at the box office. I flipped to a clean page and started making a list of names. When the workshop ended and I went home to Glen Rock, I was still working on my list. I began to think I could make something like a modern version of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, except instead of fictional folks from a fictional town, my subjects would be real people and the link between them would be me.
For the next few months, I got up as close to dawn as I could. Already they would be waiting in my head. I’d let one into my office for a few hours and we’d have our little séance. This never seemed morbid or depressing to me. I have lost too many people, I think, to make talking and thinking about them an unpleasant thing to do. My life has been shaped as much by people who are no longer living as by people who are, and perhaps this has been particularly true since I moved, in middle age, to Glen Rock, a quiet place. Writing this book has been a chance to hang out with my friends.
In Mexico, they do something like this on El Día de los Muertos: the Day of the Dead, which is observed on November 1 and 2 every year. On these days, people build altars to their loved ones with pictures and flowers and candles, with the old favorite sodas and books and T-shirts and cigarettes. Then they go to the cemetery and stay all night, praying, singing, drinking, wailing. They tell the sad stories and the noble ones; they eat cookies shaped like skeletons. They celebrate and mourn at once.
Marion Winik
Glen Rock, Pennsylvania
January 2008
The Glen Rock Book of the Dead
The Eye Doctor
MY SISTER AND I had been at sleep away camp in Milford, Pennsylvania, for almost half of our four-week sentence. Saturday, finally, was Visiting Day, when the parents would pull up to Nah Jee Wah’s gates in the family cars with boxes of brownies, packs of Twizzlers, forgotten hairbrushes and sweatshirts, awaited as if crossing the river Styx to visit us in Hades. But the night before, the head counselor came to me in the mess hall. Our mother and father had called. Something had come up; they couldn’t make it. What could it be, I thought, what could have gone wrong? I paced the dusty paths around the compound all day, eyeing other children with their parents. We had a funeral to go to, my mother wrote that week in her letter. It was a while before I learned that it was our eye doctor, a friend of the family, who had died.
I come from Nah Jee Wah so pity me, there ain’t a decent boy in CLC. And every night at nine they lock the door, I don’t know what the hell I ever came here for. Forty years later, our camp song is still stuck in my head, but my mother can only tell me the eye doctor was a classmate of Daddy’s from school, his family owned a liquor store in Asbury Park. He was a bachelor, had served in the Army. She doesn’t think he was gay. Then she recalls the cause of death was an overdose of medication he took for back pain, perhaps intentional, perhaps not. He was addicted, she says.
Like the flap of a seagull’s wing that changes the course of all future weather systems on earth, his death was a cause itself. Before long my sister and I would see another eye doctor, would be sent to a camp we didn’t hate as much, one where I ate seventeen pieces of pizza in a contest, was caught stealing another girl’s tiny china kitten, was in a production of Our Town performed for the parents on Visiting Day. It is remarkable to my mother that I remember the death of the eye doctor at all. Actually it’s not much of a memory—his moon face, my pearly eyeglasses, an empty picnic table—but it has turned out to be my job to collect things like that.
The Neighbor
HE APPEARED at our bus stop one day in sixth grade with his blond crew cut and goofy smile. His father had become principal of the high school, and they’d bought the mysterious house two doors down from us in the development. While all the other houses had flat green lawns or perhaps a single weeping cherry, this house had so many trees, you could hardly see the front door. The only member of the family we really knew was the dog, a huge wooly brown Airedale named Chumleigh who caused great hilarity and panic whenever he managed to bound away from the person holding his chain. The boy, on the other hand, stayed on the leash. Which was short, since his father was the principal. No, he could not come out to play Spud. Or ride bikes. Or take bong hits. Not that we ever asked.
These days, if you want to know a secret, you just turn on the television. Back then, there were only three channels and none of them had shows where people who were not professional actors wept and threw chairs at one another. Secrets were simply more secret, which meant rumors were more baroque. For example, people said the reason our music teacher was a little strange was because he had run over his own child playing in leaves in the driveway. It was hard to stop worrying about this. There were huge piles of leaves in those days, particularly in front of our neighbor’s house, with all those trees.
My neighbor killed himself in his first year of college. My mother saw it in the paper, and no one else has mentioned it since, nor come up with any further details. How can this be, that we have no idea what happened to this boy, that no one remembers a single conversation wi
th him? Today I found his father’s phone number on the Internet, which took about ten seconds, and I called it. I told him that I was thinking about his son. Because our old class is having a reunion, I said, fumbling for an excuse. I heard he died? There was a long pause. He said, yes. He did. Have fun at your reunion.
The Virgin
MARTIMARCANETTI, we used to call them, as if the three boys were a single entity, but Marty had the bad-boy rocker looks, Mark was the easygoing freckle-face, and Eddie, who had been held back a year, had a driver’s license and enough whiskers to buy beer. Also tinted prescription aviators, shoulder-length, frizzy ’70s hair, and a metallic green Ford Fairlane with plenty of room for my little sister, who was Mark’s girlfriend, then Marty’s. The unlikely innocent of the group, Eddie, was sweet on her too, but had it even worse for one Trisha Gorsky, a girl with jet-black hair and green eyes who never said a word to him. The four friends used to park in the lot behind the mall and drink six-packs of beer, smoke joints, and maybe take Quaaludes if they were around. The laughter echoing in the dark of the car, the green bottles piling up in the well behind the seat, my sister and Marty making out in the back until the boys up front said okay, get a room.
A night like any other, except my sister wasn’t with them, stuck home doing an eleventh-hour social studies project. They shot a game of pool, drank a couple of pitchers with some guys at the bowling alley. Piled into the Fairlane so Eddie could take everybody home. A sprinkle of rain, a shortcut behind the SPCA building in Eatontown, and a head-on collision with another car. Broken arms, shattered glass, no word from Eddie in the front seat. A couple of days later half our high school is staring into an open coffin, wondering if you need tinted aviators and an uncomfortable suit in the afterlife. Just in case, someone slips in a J. Geils album. Mark—now a missionary in Thailand and the father of many children, and still friends with Marty, who’s a trucker—remembers they saw Trisha Gorsky at the funeral, her cheeks wet with tears.
The Big Sister
I WENT TO Hebrew school with a delicate redhead who had two older sisters. While the younger girls took after their angular, elegant Mama, the eldest had inherited Papa Bear’s body type and, as in my household, the disappearance of unwanted portions of her anatomy was a vigorous family project. Whether at the beach club or Thanksgiving dinner, the mothers who had chubby daughters always had something to talk about, new diet plans and weight-loss tips and doctors’ names traded over zero-calorie iced coffee whips, proud reports of sixteen pounds lost in six weeks—or perhaps a relapse, whispered behind a hand. The older fat girls were in more serious trouble than I was, but I knew I would be there soon enough if the diets did not work. The chins. The arms. The bunched white tubers of thigh, like feral daikon radishes left too long to burgeon underground.
There is no good time for a fat girl, but the sixties and early seventies were particularly hard. One of the sweetest and most talented, a singer with the voice of a nightingale, would die young from heart failure and be said to have choked on a ham sandwich, as if people couldn’t get enough of calling her a pig. Even at a good women’s college in New York City like the one my friend’s sister went to, I doubt smart girls were any kinder than stupid girls. That morning she struggled into the subway station in her woolen suit and stylishly bobbed hair, carrying her heavy book bag. No one knew, when she toppled in front of a subway car, whether it was because she had eaten only a piece of dry toast since the day before, whether her head was swimming from the don’t-eat pills, or whether she just decided to lay that body down. Forty-some years later, it’s the skinny girls who are dying. My Twelve-Grape Diet: A Model Confesses. If she were here, we could order a pizza and cluck our tongues.
The Painter
AGAIN, AT CAMP, I got a letter. Well, not camp, really; it was a meditation retreat in the mountains near Taos—I was seventeen. There was no phone there, so they had already buried my grandfather at a cemetery in Long Island by the time I heard anything about it. It was not a terrible blow; Papa had had a stroke some years before and had been remote and silent ever since.
He was not a talker in the first place, and he was hell on waitresses, but when we were small, he and my grandmother doted on my sister and me. They took us out to dinner every Tuesday at Grossman’s Deli in Asbury and one time on vacation to Hershey, Pennsylvania. My mother tells how they came over so often, sometimes they would show up when we weren’t home and just wait. She’d turn the corner and see their car parked in front of the house. Shit, she would say. Her own parents had died before I was born.
My mother says Papa believed his life had been ruined because everything came too easily to him; that’s why he never gave my father and his other sons a cent. His childhood did sound glamorous, each brother born on a different continent. One in South Africa, one in England, Papa in Sydney, Australia. But despite the business successes, their father died young after a nervous breakdown, which was the term then for virtually any kind of mental illness. Surely it was that inheritance, not the financial one, behind his stubborn joylessness.
He painted. Not well. But a lot, at least for a few years. The walls of their apartment were hung with rectangular canvases, done predominantly in olive green and black, sometimes with harvest gold or a little blue. Many suggested a fall through outer space, combining abstract arcs and lines with the tumbling silhouette of a long-haired, curvy female figure, sort of like the little nymphet used to illustrate the Playboy party jokes page, which I also spent a lot of time studying in my youth. The paintings I remember down to the ridges in the oil paint and the lacquer on the box frames.
The oddball of the group was a potato print, done in his signature colors, modeled after one I had brought home from elementary school. For a long time, my picture hung beside his on the wall. The way he and my grandmother went on, you would have thought I had invented potato prints. Oh, yes, my mother says dryly, you were his favorite. Suddenly I thought this was where it began: my long romantic career among the distant and inaccessible, certain I am the bright little girl who can light up their lives.
The Jeweler
IT WAS 1977, the days of Eden in the city of Austin, Texas. I was living there the summer before my senior year of college in New England, and though I was double-majoring in history and semiotics, I had figured out my true purpose in life, which was to own a frozen yogurt store. Frozen yogurt was new; I was an early and passionate convert. One day, while window-shopping for a location in the university area, I took a flight of stairs behind the Varsity Theater and found him in his tiny jewelry shop, safety glasses strapped to his head, making comets of amethyst and silver.
He was about twenty-five, which was old to me, and looked like a Bavarian elf—pink cheeks, smooth skin, goatee and thin ponytail. I explained about my frozen yogurt store. Have you ever had vanilla ice cream with fresh mangoes? he asked. He made it for me after an Indian dinner in his apartment: the first time I had a pappadum, the first time I visited someone whose canvases were stacked against their unfinished walls.
A burning draft card, purple comets in oil-crayon galaxies. Oh! I said, I love these, and he gave me three or four. How much he liked me made me nervous.
We didn’t stay in touch, and he died before I moved back to Austin in 1983. He went through a crazy time, I heard, cocaine and strippers at the Yellow Rose, and just when people had almost given up on him he met a wonderful girl. She spoke six languages. Her whole family loved him. Their wedding was practically an affair of state, with limousines full of flowers and diplomats strung down the road. Lady Bird Johnson, even. A month later he slipped out of their bed for a few hours to visit his old friends; when his new wife woke up in the morning he was dead beside her: a cocaine heart attack. The wedding gifts were still in their boxes and the bluebonnets in bloom when all the fancy people had to come back for the funeral.
Today frozen yogurt is everywhere but I have lost my taste for it, and I also long ago lost one of the Colombian emerald earrings he made for my tw
enty-first birthday; my mother bought the stones and he set them in little cylinders of gold. The other one I’m wearing right now.
The Carpenter
THAT SAME SUMMER, at a swimming hole in Austin where we were playing backgammon and eating bagels, a couple of cute boys from our home state came up to introduce themselves. One of them, an immigrant Italian barber’s son, would become my brother, and not only because he married my sister seven years later.
He was our Dean Moriarty, irresistible, legendary, bossy, and full of ideas. He could build anything, fix anything, and he could talk to dogs. He was the first white person I knew to appreciate hip-hop. He had a union card. He talked like Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. He had scholarships to art schools in Kansas City and New York, and he loved Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In Texas he spray-painted the name of my first book on a railroad bridge, and when we moved to New York, zoomed around at night printing the shapes of T-shirts on the walls. He and my sister hopped yachts in Florida, sent postcards from his relatives’ town in Italy, shipped home little packages of heroin from Thailand. He was not afraid of needles.
Next to one another, our lives were an object lesson in the class structure of the late twentieth-century East Coast suburb, the Italians versus the Jews. For example, the vast difference in the amount of money and attention devoted to our flat feet, lazy eyes, and crooked teeth, our little talents and our educations. He mocked me for how carefully I divided the phone bill in our communal apartment, which, I had to point out, was furnished entirely through his trash picking. We used to laugh ourselves sick with our version of Sonny and Cher’s theme song: Well I don’t know if all that’s true, but you got me and baby, I got you. Babe. Doo doo doo doo. Fuck you, babe.
