Nuclear Family

by Susanna Fogel

  I also wanted to let you know that Uncle Ken called me last night to ask a favor regarding his wedding in Florida next month. It’s last minute, but Ron’s nephew reached out and said he would like to attend after all. He’s not sure whether or not he’s going to tell his parents, because as you know they are objecting to the wedding on religious grounds. But he has always felt close to Ron and would like to show his support. Ken called to ask if we had any spare room in the AirBedandBreakfast.com we’re renting, since the hotels are all booked this late in the game. I told him it’s pretty tight quarters, but Ron’s nephew is welcome to sleep on the pullout couch. I’m not sure whether he’ll take me up on my offer—he might not be comfortable with sleeping in an exposed space with so many women around, given his religion, but I’m not familiar with all the rules. I’m sure he feels the same way about the Jews!

  Anyway, I hope it’s okay with you and Jane that I offered—I’ve just e-mailed her too. If you’d like to contact Ron’s nephew in advance to introduce yourself, Uncle Ken said he thinks he’s on Facebook. His name is Bridger Jensen, and he’s based in Provo, Utah, where he works as a tour guide on hikes and camping trips. He sounds like a very brave and compassionate young man, figuring out which parts of his faith make sense to him and which don’t. I’m really looking forward to meeting him.

  See you in Key West! I’m already dreaming about which songs by the Four Tops I’m going to request on the dance floor!

  Love,

  Mom

  Your Sister, on Your New Mormon Cousin

  UGHHHHHH WHY DOES MOM HAVE TO INVITE A RANDOM JESUS FREAK TO CRASH WITH US?!?!!?

  all I have to say is he better not judge me for all the weed I am planning to smoke on this trip lol. srsly im about to spend all my fuckin vacation days for the year and i intend to get my moneys worth! i bet he’ll be nice tho cause isn’t that like part of their religion? there was this Mormon guy Tad who worked with me at TJ maxx and he was the friendliest fuckin man. he was weird tho—like one time our boss asked him to vacuum and he didn’t wanna go into the intimates section so he made me vacuum that area for him! i guess he didn’t want to touch the underwear that fell on the floor or something for religious reasons? i was like sure whatever dude I don’t really care if god judges me for picking up these fuckin huge purple panties no one wanted to buy in a regular store haha. he ended up moving down to mexico to convert people to his faith or whatever. oh fuck what if ron’s nephew tries to do that to us?! watch Mom become a Mormon now haha. that lady is so fuckin obsessed with other cultures.

  Your Sister Has an Update about Your New Mormon Cousin

  JULES.

  I AM AN ASSHOLE.

  im so sorry i didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to u before you left for the airport this am!!!!!! I really hope u weren’t worried about me bc I didn’t sleep @ the condo last night. dont worry I didn’t like go home w the caterer or anything. Despite his efforts hahaha

  Actually the reason I didn’t come home is more unexpected … it has to do with Bridger our new fave Mormon cousin LOL. that sounds bad … we just stayed up talking and it wasn’t romantic or anything—I don’t even think he is allowed to hook up with girls even if he wanted to which is a shame for the women of the world bc did u see his fuckin muscles when he was holding up the chairs for that jewish chair dance?!?! Probably cause the mormons make him like chop logs all day for the temple or whatever …

  Anyway i don’t think u got much of a chance to talk to Bridger cuz you had yr hands full with mom (omg when she was singin along and dancing to that “aint no mountain high enough aint no valley low enough” song and everyone was like GO BARBARA! GO BARBARA! GO GO GO BARBARA! bahahahaha). but I was talkin to him in line for the bathroom and told him I liked his speech about ron and we started talking and guess what? it turns out Bridger is also adopted!!!!! We kinda ended up bonding about that bc its like if we had been adopted by other families, our lives wd be so different and maybe we would fit in better (no offense to u obviously u are my bae but u know what i mean…).

  So yah I guess the wedding was pretty weird for him bc as you know his whole family like refused to come bc they don’t approve of homosexuality and Bridger was like, um this is my favorite fuckin person in this family and its legal now federally so who the fuck cares at this point?!! It actually made me appreciate mom and dad for all their craziness cause at least we have never had to deal with them like hating other people for their life choices??? He is just realizing he doesnt see eye to eye with his family as he gets older but he doesn’t want to hurt them by like leaving the church or whatever? anyway we were just sitting around on the beach talking (I may or may not have brought a bottle of wine I stole from the bar and drunk it myself bc he doesnt drink LOL) and we ended up falling asleep. nothing else happened but he is a really cool guy and we added each other on FB. it was just one of those random nights where yr like ok maybe not everyone is what I thought!!!!!!!!!!!! LIFE LESSONSSSSSSS

  did u have a good time???? i had so much fun dancing with u. OH ALSO at some pt we need to talk about how grandma rose drank like four scotches before her toast and then talked all this shit about mom and dad’s marriage! she was all THS IS THE FIRST TIME IVE LIKED ANYONE A CHILD OF MINE HAS MARRIED. Did u see mom’s face? Shes thinkin like ummmmm wait I am yr only other child hahaha. oh well sorry dad apparently u did not make a very good impression on this side of the family! not that dad wd even care. He’d be like whatever i only care what chinese people think of me now haha.

  Luv u babe!

  Jane

  Your Grandma Rose Has Been Communicating with Another Dimension

  Julie, You should come to visit soon so you can see what is happening with my little owls. You know I collect things with owls, like magnets, clocks. When I walk past them now their eyes follow me, and they watch me in the kitchen. The big owl clock you got me for my birthday is in charge of everything and he talks to me while he keeps the time.

  Your Sister Thinks Your Grandma Rose Might Be Losing Her Shit

  hey dude i just called u but it went straight to vm. did grandma rose email u about some painting in her apartment that started talking or some shit??? do u think she is fuckin with us? i mean shes usually funny but shes never really played a joke like that on us …

  I kinda think we shd tell mom. i know shes at some Shakespeare festival in vermont with that lady loni and I don’t wanna bug her but just in case there is some kind of situation she needs to deal with or whatever? i dunno. i might try to call grandma on my next cig break just to see if shes ok. text me before 5 if u want me to dial u in.

  (or maybe rose is just high on some new meds or something in which case she needs to hook a granddaughter up LOL)

  Your Mom Has Been Having Some Issues with Regularity

  Hi girls,

  I’m e-mailing instead of calling because it’s after visiting hours in the ICU. Dr. Atay let me stay in Grandma’s room an extra hour as long as I promised not to disrupt the patients who are asleep. Hopefully this typing sound won’t wake anyone up.

  Grandma’s doing much better! The medication reduced the swelling in her brain, so she’s stopped hallucinating, even though she did ask Dr. Atay if he was part of a government conspiracy. I know she’ll be so happy to see you both in the morning. Were you able to get yourselves on a red-eye?

  Could one of you also do me a favor? If either of your airports has one of those General Nutrition Center kiosks, could you pick up something for me with buckwheat, bran, or another type of fiber? Tablets are fine, but I prefer a powder I can put in yogurt. I was so distracted when I was packing, I forgot to bring that Ziploc bag with all my stuff from Whole Foods you girls call my “other purse.”

  I can’t wait to have you two here with me.

  Love,

  Mom

  PS—Julie, Dr. Atay is about your age. I think his family is from Turkey. He doesn’t wear a wedding ring, but I haven’t been able to get more information because every time I ask about h
is home life, he suddenly has to go see other patients. Maybe my mom can help us do a little detective work when she wakes up.

  The Container of Hummus in Your Grandma’s Hospital Room Has Another Take on Suffering

  Julie,

  I am so deeply sorry. To stand by your grandmother’s bedside as she nears death, unconscious for days on end, is purgatory in itself. What profound suffering your family must feel as you gather to remember this matriarch, to honor her memory and her profound impact on those she touched as she prepares to pass to another life.

  Also: I can hear your stomach growling from all the way across the room.

  You cast furtive glances in my direction, craving my garlicky protein aboard a cracker or baby carrot. Yet, you stop yourself. How can you even think about eating at a time like this? Why haven’t you cried yet? Worse still, you were able to sleep a full eight hours last night! Are these not signs that you are heartless, you silently wonder. Surely this is not how one suffers if one truly cares about anyone but oneself and one’s own base needs. Surely you are not grieving right. And for that you feel “awkward.”

  Forgive me, but in the Middle East we do not understand this concept, “awkwardness.”

  Come; reward yourself for the excellent choice of snack you made when you stopped at Costco on your way to the hospital. I am a versatile spread or dip, centerpiece of so many tables. Family reunions, funerals, fraternity parties, book clubs—name a gathering, and hummus is there! I am, so to speak, the great equalizer. (Ironic, since my origin lies in the West Bank, no?)

  Do not get me wrong! I am comfortable here in my perch on the countertop near the medical waste bin, next to your mother’s purse (which is itself so capacious that in my homeland one would have assumed it transported several Uzis). From this vantage point I have watched visitors come and go. First, your uncle Ken and his husband, Ron, arrived with small speakers to play the Italian opera your grandmother loved. I watched as Rose, though unconscious, moved her lips as if trying to sing along. Next, your mother’s friend from childhood arrived with flowers—Sarah, the one who could be her identical twin. (Though perhaps this is my bias—I must admit I find it difficult to physically distinguish Jewish women in their sixties from one another. But I love them all, just as they love me. In addition to physical likeness, they all share a deep love for hummus.) They laughed through tears, remembering the time Rose forced them to sit inside on a summer day and listen to a lecture on how to do their own taxes so they would never need to depend on a man in financial matters.

  And you! Who could doubt that you loved your grandmother? Memories of her will come to you throughout life without any effort at all. This is the nature of grief. It is irrational and haunts us when we least expect it. Perhaps next week, after returning to Los Angeles, you will walk to the Atwater Village Farmers’ Market and see a granddaughter helping her grandmother sell candles. Then, your tears may come. Perhaps in five years, you will dream one night that you are at the beach with Rose, only to wake and remember she is gone. Then, to sleep will be impossible. Perhaps in ten, you will vacation in England and plum pie will be on the dessert menu. You will remember it was the only thing Rose ever baked. Then, you will be unable to eat. It is in these moments that we stop thinking of ourselves. They will come soon enough.

  Perhaps your sister, Jane, has realized this. As she sits by the window, look carefully in her lap. She is playing Candy Crush. And she may have loved Rose most of all.

  Thus why leave me untouched on the counter, only to discard me when you leave for the night because I have been sitting out for twelve hours and technically I do need to be refrigerated?

  Peel back my wrapper; do not forsake me.

  —Sabra™

  Your Dad, Who Never Liked His Mother-in-Law, Just Saw She Died on Facebook

  Julie,

  I saw on your Facebook page that you lost your maternal grandmother last night. Thank you for tagging me in the photo of all of us on Christmas in the midnineties. Out of respect for Mei-Ling I have removed the tag, but I do remember that day fondly, from the matinee of Braveheart to our dinner at Hunan Palace with the Isersons.

  As you know, your Grandma Rose and I never saw eye to eye while I was married to your mother. I still believe that had she found a better psychopharmacologist and the right SSRI, she might have had some relief from her petty negativity and rigid judgments. It’s unfortunate that she was so resistant to discussing this with me when I would raise the issue at family dinners.

  Still, I’m sure she will be deeply missed by some. Please pass along my condolences to your sister as well.

  Dad

  Your Sister Has an Idea for How to Put the Fun in Funeral

  Heya,

  Just tried to leave u a voice mail but I think yr phone is dead. Or u are probably busy w/mom helping her make arrangements for the funeral ugh. So sorry to ditch u and put all of that on you … my boss is so psycho to make me fly back to Arizona just to work for TWO FUCKING DAYS and then just fly all the way back across the country to say goodbye to my fucking grandmas body. He is such a dick dude. You know this is all bc he tried to bone me when I first started here and i shut that shit down … ugh everything that douche does is so fuckin against the law …

  Anyway i was wondering if u can do me a favor—big surprise cuz i am always asking u for favors haha. do u remember my friend alex from HS who worked at Aaron Bros picture frames? tall with red hair? So he is kinda dealing now and I had asked if he could hook me up with some shrooms when I come back this weekend. I know that sounds weird probably but I did them last fall when I had to put Riley to sleep after he bit that sheriff … I went out to the desert with all these pix of us on all of our adventures and his old collar and bowls etc. and did shrooms and just like sat with his memory for a few hours and left all the stuff there and it was like I was laying him to rest in peace in my memory if that makes sense?

  U can see where this is going. i wanna do that with grandma rose.

  I think Sunday after the funeral I am gunna drive down to the south shore by rhode island where she used to rent that little house and just sit on the beach and like feel allllllllll the feelings ugh. do u wanna come? I am gonna bring all the stuff that reminds me of Grandma, like those ginger snaps she used to buy that i used to hate when I was little then I realized they are actually fucking awesome, and pix of her old house in seattle where she had all those fruit trees and she used to give me rides in the wheelbarrow (I know she used to do that w/you too from your Instagram pix on Throwback Thursday) and that poem she always used to read us about the Jabberwocky.

  Ugh fuck im crying even typing this im a fuckin mess. This is hitting me like a ton of fuckin bricks for some reason. Grandma rose was my favorite person in the family except you. and I don’t share DNA with any of you but i felt like i had a resemblance to her in personality u know? she was just this no BS awesome fuckin lady.

  anyway that’s why I wanna do this shrooms thing i think u should join me for. I know u are not really a drug person but this is a special occasion and I really think it would be good for you to get out of your head and we would have this special experience as sisters. Omg I sound like a lifetime movie lol but u know what I mean.

  Either way this is where the favor comes in … so that dude alex said he has shrooms in stock (haha “in stock” u can tell i have been workin retail too fucking long) and he can hook me up but he has to go to Albany tomorrow afternoon to visit his son (did I tell u he knocked up some randomass woman he met at an Eve 6 concert???) so he would need someone to pick them up before 4 p.m. tomorrow. As u know my flight doesn’t get in till like midnight so is there any way u can meet Alex during the day and grab them? he works in dedham in the dunkin donuts at the train station off route 128. He said he will meet u by the commuter rail parking lot. i told him he has to store it in like five containers bc you are fuckin paranoid. text me if u are down and i will give u alex’s #

  i hope I am not putting u in an uncomfortabl
e situation by asking this!

  i also hope u will decide to come to the beach with me sunday. It will be fucking intense obviously but its like whatever we only live once and so did grandma, u know?

  Love u girl,

  Jane

  Ps—mom said Raj asked if he can come to the funeral since he met Grandma when u were together? are u thinking about giving him a second chance? Just be careful boo. I know im the younger one but when it comes to u, I am a fuckin psycho mama bear.

  Pps—I am thinking about getting a tattoo with grandmas bday on it. I told mom cause u know she always said to tell her if we ever get tattoos (not that she has any chance of that happening w/you haha). she was actually cool w/it and I think she was touched, she said just don’t get it on my arm cause of the Nazis. Why is everything always about being Jewish with her!!!?!!?

  Your Sister, Who Has Two Exes in Jail, Agrees That You Gotta Do You

  HEY GIRL HEY

  I saw the pic on insta of u givin raj a piggy back ride @ your bday party. first of all how wasted were u hahaha.

  anyway im assuming u posted it so everyone cd see that you guys have decided to give it another chance and i just wanted to say i am happy for u. i know I was warning you when he came to grandma’s funeral and shit but last weekend this girl at my work’s sister came to visit and she gave us these personality tests from a magazine about psychology and she said i need to work on not being so suspicious. so yah. I just wanted to say I respect whatever u choose, especially in this time that has been hard w/grandma dying and you being depressed about turning 34 and not being a real writer yet etc. so whatever makes u feel good I cannot argue with … and also guys can change! Like u cant force them to but if its their idea it can happen. Um hello that’s how AA stays in business.