Don't Go Crazy Without Me

by Deborah A. Lott

  On the way home in the car, Joey tried to be suitably tragic, singing some of the lines from “Yesterday.” Whenever Joey needed to make sense of what was happening, he turned to the Beatles.

  At our house, after the funeral, I watched people gorge themselves on overflowing platters of deli food. The men smelled up our house with cigars. Stella, my grandmother’s private duty nurse from the convalescent hospital, stood in our kitchen in her stocking feet. She was no taller than my grandmother, under five feet, but her body was a solid square mass topped by a head of curly, coal-black hair at the top. She was speaking too loudly in a Bronx accent that I knew Rebecca had found crude.

  “Becky was a doll,” she said, “a real doll.”

  I hadn’t recognized the archetypal, all-forgiving, self-sacrificing Jewish mother in the rabbi’s eulogy and I didn’t recognize the woman in Stella’s words either. Whatever Rebecca had been, she was no doll. If it wasn’t bad enough that death transformed people, afterward they were lost all over again as others distorted and reshaped their reputations. Was I the only one who remembered the complicated soul my grandmother had been?

  My mother opened a box of chocolates someone had brought over. She offered one to Stella, who took the entire box, spread her feet wide, and balanced the chocolates on her lap.

  “Becky was no trouble at all to take care of,” she jabbered on, proceeding to stuff her mouth with one after another of the gummy, fruit-jelly-filled chocolates. Her teeth turned raspberry pink. “A sweetie. She was a sweetie. I’ll miss her so much.” She began to cry, chocolaty brown spittle now dripping out the sides of her mouth.

  I retreated to the bedroom with Joey and his little brother, Jamie, to play board games. We could reside in our own cocoon, protected from the adult proceedings outside the door. When I lost Careers, I slipped into my closet, shed my clothes, and emerged to dance what I suspected would be my final, commemorative, feather-waving-in-my-hand, finger-atop-my-head, naked Hokey Pokey. Since there was no touching, and Jamie was present, there was no danger of this being sex. Instead this felt like a nostalgic homage to our innocent play of the past. Jamie’s eyes lit up at the sight of my naked body, and he smiled for the first time since the funeral. Yes, what I was doing was courageous, providing my own little USO show for the troops, a needed service to cheer Joey and his brother up after the tragic loss of our grandmother.

  It cheered me up too: I wasn’t Rebecca; my body was young, lithe, vital. I was alive and I was sexy and I was dancing.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Folie à Deux

  In the immediate days, weeks, and ultimately months following my grandmother’s death, my father continued the protest he’d begun in his coffin-side wail by refusing to reconcile himself to the loss. He could not carry on without Rebecca, he said. He would not live without her. Every day he survived widened the distance between them, his surviving her an ongoing act of desertion. Every day he said screw Nature by refusing to concede to her death.

  This required that he emulate her inanimate state, with the help of Seconal and Percodan, Butisol Sodium, and Tuinol. Rendering himself unconscious was as close as he could get to suspending time. I shared a similar wish; part of me longed to freeze time so I didn’t have to be a body in sway to its transformative forces, so that I did not have to grow up and age and die, so that I would not lose any more people I loved. Another part of me dueled with this impulse, propelling me forward into the future and growing up.

  When Ira was awake, he refused to shower, shave, or get dressed. He halted all semblance of work, scarcely venturing into the office. He gave up eating big meals and regressed into consuming only the soft foods suitable to a toddler’s palate.

  My mother tried to explain my father’s behavior to me. “He’s having a breakdown. This isn’t the first time. Rebecca was always the one who could pull him out.”

  “How could that be?” I said. “They used to have such terrible, screaming fights.”

  “The fights didn’t mean anything. Your father likes to fight, and so did she. She held him together.”

  “I thought you were the one who held him together.”

  “Nah. I’m a pushover. Her will was as strong as his. Rebecca was the real reason your father was able to make a living and get married and have children. He did it for her. His life could have gone other ways.”

  If Ira didn’t get back to work soon, my mother said, the family would not survive financially. He held the agent’s license, and she wasn’t allowed to sell policies. The insurance companies would only deal with a man in charge; we needed him to remain the front person.

  My mother had been sitting in the office since 8:00 a.m. She’d pulled her steno chair into the middle of the room, pinned her hair back more severely than usual, put on a fresh coat of bright red lipstick, and dressed in a crisp shirtwaist dress. She’d armored herself for the confrontation. She would put her will where Rebecca’s had been.

  At eleven thirty my father hesitated at the doorway of the room, dressed in the same flannel nightshirt he’d worn for days, bits of egg yolk from a week’s worth of breakfasts encrusted down the front of it, crumbs stuck in his coarse, black beard.

  “Ira, come in here and get back to work. Just for a few minutes. It will distract you and make you feel better. You’re too turned in on yourself.”

  My father shrugged.

  “Ira, you’ve got to get a grip on yourself or you’re going to take us all down with you. Is that really what you want, to take your family down?”

  Poised in my mother’s lap sat a large leather-bound book labeled M, one volume of her ten alphabetically organized accounting ledgers. These ledger books constituted the most overt symbol of my mother’s attempt to manage our family’s financial life. There might have been chaos all around her, but in these books, in my mother’s even cursive hand, everything would be neatly accounted for.

  My father lurked just outside the door.

  “C’mon, Ira,” my mother said in her sweetest, most coaxing voice, her lips held tight in self-restraint. It was the voice one might use with a stubborn two-year-old. My father walked a few steps into the room but would not sit down at his desk. He twirled his hair and brooded. Eva returned to her bookkeeping, her lips moving as she performed subvocal mathematical calculations. She could do the most complex computations in her head.

  “C’mon, honey. You’ll feel better if you’re productive.”

  My father sneered, and my mother’s voice acquired an edge.

  “We’re going to go down,” she said. “That is not an idle threat; you are going to take us all down with you. Is that what Rebecca would want? Or would she want you to be a mensch and take care of your family?”

  At the mention of his mother’s name, my father advanced farther into the room and began to circle my mother’s chair, his black eyes blazing. “What would Rebecca want? What would Rebecca want? How could you begin to know what Rebecca would want? If I hadn’t listened to all of you, Rebecca would still be here to tell me.” He began to rock back and forth, alternately whimpering, then moaning, wringing his hands.

  “Don’t tsitter,” my mother said. “I can’t concentrate when you tsitter like that.” He sat down on the leather couch my mother had bought during the remodel. Ordinarily he would be up and down on the couch all day, and its back had begun to tear, a small tuft of white cotton stuffing protruding from the wear. He picked up one of our three telephones.

  I came into the room and sat in the chair at my father’s desk and watched while he dialed a number. The same number he called over and over again. He knew it by heart. We all knew it by heart. Rebecca’s old phone number. The first phone number I’d memorized after our own—our number, Rebecca’s number, Joey’s number. My father held the receiver to his ear pensively. I pictured Rebecca’s old-fashioned phone in its built-in nook in the hallway. A phone from the 1940s with its curvilinear base and heavy handset whose high-pitched, brassy ring jarred and echoed in the hallway the w
ay phones did in ’40s noir thrillers. The receiver weighed on your shoulder; whatever you said on my grandmother’s phone automatically gained significance from the instrument’s physical encumbrance.

  In my imagination, the hall was dark and the phone rang and rang, its shrill tone reverberating off the walls. Then I remembered that the phone was gone. The house was no longer hers; it had been sold and emptied of all her belongings. Someone else lived there now. Some stranger’s belongings were in my grandmother’s house. A different phone. Another number.

  My father listened as the phone at the other end rang one, two, three times, and then the click of a tape recording came on and a woman’s voice nasally declared, “You have reached a disconnected number.” When he heard the tape, Ira’s face contorted in disbelief and he flung the receiver down and began to make the sounds of weeping. Dry weeping, weeping without tears, with no promise of release. With the receiver open, the harsh recorded proof of my grandmother’s annihilation echoed in the air.

  “I can’t believe it,” he sobbed. “No, no, no, my mama can’t really be gone.” He exited the office and crawled back into bed. My mother sat at her desk and continued to do her calculations, her tears dripping onto the ledger’s pages.

  Nights, I listened from my own bed as my father paced the bare hardwood floors of our house, from one end to the other and back. I’d sit up in bed and watch him, and when he moved out of sight, I would conjure the rest of the scene in my head. I felt as if my vigilance could protect him, protect me, even though he never knew I was watching. As he walked in his long flannel nightshirt, barefoot, through the length of our house, the floors creaked with the uneven cadence of his limp. First a loud creak, then a slight groan, a beat, and then another lighter creak, punctuated by sighs and groans and whimpers. Tsittering.

  He paced the hall in front of my brothers’ and my bedroom, then he went into the kitchen, turned on the lights, turned them off, then on again. Opened the refrigerator, closed it. Flung open each of the kitchen cupboards in turn and rifled through them. What was he looking for? Food, painkillers, stashed sedatives, whatever he could find to quell his agitation. He must have picked up a bottle of bourbon; I heard the cap ring as it fell and twirled on the tile counter. Then I heard him take a swig right out of the bottle, swallow hard, and groan.

  From the kitchen my father went into the living room and turned on lights that lit up the hallway and threw shadows into my room. He adjusted the thermostat so that the furnace flared up full blast, and then he stood over the blue flame, where I could see him, hear his muttering echo through the metal grate. Just when it grew so hot in my room that I had to throw off my pink chenille bedspread, he turned the thermostat down.

  He approached the front door, parted the drapes roughly over the paned window and turned on the porch light. Giant moths and dragonflies must have swarmed around the sudden illumination. He gripped the nubby green drapes in his hands, peered out between them into the night. Then he began to speak.

  “Oh, Mama,” he wailed. “How could I have put you alone into the cold ground?” He sobbed. Heaving, exaggerated, stage sobs. My mother often referred to my father’s emotional outbursts as histrionics. A form of performance. A spell he put himself under that could be broken by a funny line, or my mother’s incredulous expression. In fact, my father had often seemed to regard his own emotions this way too. Pausing in the middle of a display of anger or outrage, anxiety or melancholy, he would stop to take a reading of the audience’s reaction, smile and break character, or wink at me as if to acknowledge my being in on the act. Now in the wake of my grandmother’s death, my father had lost the comic distance that had always saved him.

  Who was he performing for now? I wondered. Not for me; he couldn’t have known that I was watching. Framed in the soft light of the living room, my father railed out into the dark night, talking to no one, talking to his dead mother, talking to the God he didn’t believe in.

  Other nights I’d be startled from deep sleep by a flashlight shining in my face, and my father’s face peering over me, so close that I could not escape his sour breath.

  “Baby, baby, baby,” he’d say. “Are you okay? Are you okay? Tell me you’re still breathing.”

  My father wasn’t the only one in our house preoccupied with Rebecca’s death. During the long nights, as he paced the floors, I wasn’t just sitting up in bed so that I could watch him. I was sitting up in bed because I was afraid to lie down and close my eyes. Every time I did, the final image of my grandmother in her casket overtook me. There she was again, in her translucent white veil, and under it, her strangely waxen, powdered skin, and that unnatural smile. I’d linger on her ghoulishly upturned lips and then jump to the terrible moment when they dropped her coffin into the ground. Above all other things, my grandmother loathed dirt. She was forever sweeping it out of her house, taking laxatives and enemas to purge it from her body, and following the rules of kashruth to banish it from her food. Despite all these efforts, she had wound up buried under it. As instructed by the rabbi at her funeral, I’d contributed by throwing a shovelful of it onto her myself. In my fourteen years, I’d encoun tered no sound more awful than that of soil and tiny rocks striking and then rolling off the sides of my grandmother’s coffin.

  But no, she wouldn’t look like she had at her funeral anymore, would she? As I mentally followed Rebecca into the ground each night, I could not help but chart her ongoing deterioration. Her body had not escaped time either. Had mud seeped onto her white dress, were bugs eating her flesh, had her skin already rotted off her bones? When my father stood at the window, staring, seeking her in the darkness, could she hear him crying?

  “I can’t get Grandma’s dead body out of my mind,” I told my mother one Friday night as we worked in the kitchen together, rolling out dough for biscuits on the pullout wooden cutting board. “I don’t know how to stop seeing it.”

  “You’re just being morbid,” my mother said, the implication being that this was a willful act.

  “How can I not be morbid?” I said.

  “Don’t think morbid thoughts,” she answered. This was an impossible tautology: I was morbid, so I thought morbid thoughts. If I could stop thinking morbid thoughts, then I wouldn’t be morbid.

  “The thoughts just come to me,” I said. “How can anyone control their own thoughts?” Could my mother control her thoughts, or did she have no idea of what I was up against because she just didn’t have thoughts like mine? Only my father could understand me. He thought the way I did, but I couldn’t get even the small comfort of sharing my thoughts with him because he was in the midst of a breakdown.

  “You can put them out of your mind instead of indulging them.” Indulging? How could she call horrific, unbidden images of my grandmother’s body—which were making me miserable—an indulgence? Didn’t indulgences make you feel good?

  She formed her biscuits with a glass turned upside down, each one perfectly round, and then spaced them evenly apart on the cookie sheet.

  “What does it mean that she was buried on my birthday?” In my mind, this concurrence of events was an omen whose meaning I could not decipher.

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a coincidence. You’re being superstitious.” The dough stuck to my fingers. My biscuits looked malformed, pathetic next to my mother’s.

  “How do you know coincidences are just coincidences? What if they’re really messages? They feel like messages I can’t figure out how to read.”

  “Messages? From whom? From God? If there’s a god, do you think he has time to be sending little Debbie Lott messages? Of all the millions of people in the world? We’re not at the center of the universe. If there’s a god, he’s got his hands full with way more important things.”

  “If there are no messages, how do we know that anything we do has any meaning? Is it all just random?”

  “We make up the meaning, that’s all. We try to be good people. We’re productive. We carry on.”

 
“Do you think Grandma wants me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “What if she’s lonesome and needs me to be with her? What if she’s mad at me for living when she has to be dead? Daddy said once that the dead envy the living.”

  “Your father says a lot of nutty things. Why do you listen to him? Why have you always listened to him? Dead people don’t want anything. They’re gone. When we die, it’s as if we’d never existed.” She clapped her hands together and sent a fine dust of flour into the air. “Gone,” she said. “Poof.” My mother laughed.

  Which was scarier? My grandmother vanished into a cloud of flour dust or my grandmother haunting me eternally? The universe loaded with dark messages or the universe devoid of all meaning? I couldn’t pick.

  “Why do you and your father always gravitate to the morbid?” she said, opening the hot oven and putting the tray of biscuits in. “Just put it all out of your mind.”

  Joey’s family made an easier adjustment. Just as they had converted their Sunday afternoon visits to my grandmother’s house to visits to King Solomon’s nursing home, they now converted those visits to cemetery outings. They got dressed up, left flowers at Rebecca’s grave, read the neighboring tombstones, took home movies, went out to eat afterward.

  Uncle Nathan adopted a scraggly stray cat that had shown up on their doorstep. He joked that she was my grandmother reincarnated.

  “I recognized her right away,” he said. “A hisser just like Becky.”