by Cara Mentzel
“The Masterpiece” was about how babies build themselves from scratch with a divine knowingness in each cell. I suggested that if we can work with spirit in our own creation, we can certainly heal ourselves as we grow older. “There’s a sweetness to healing,” I wrote, “that comes when you experience yourself as divine.”
I read the piece to Grandma over the phone. She wasn’t a spiritual woman; she liked to cook the Passover Seder, and that pretty much summed up her relationship with God—at least as far as I knew. Yet, she was a generous audience. She listened in silence as I read every word of the article to her from the clipping I’d cut out of the paper. She never interrupted to say, What? or I don’t get it. I didn’t know if she liked the content, the sound of my voice, or that I had called and paid attention to her. But she attended to every word I read. “Beautiful,” she said at the end. “That was beautiful, Cara.” She looked forward to subsequent stories. I looked forward to making her laugh, and wrote some funny ones for her. Making her laugh felt like an achievement in its own right. When she laughed with me it was as if seventy years had evaporated and she was all child, all playful.
I tried to call Grandma the night she died. She was in the hospital in New York where she’d been a lot that year—for surgery, a host of tests, and once because her ICD (implanted defibrillator) went off in a restaurant. It knocked her out of her seat, stiff as a board, and frightened everyone, herself the most of all.
With each visit to the hospital Grandma seemed less likely to leave. And she knew it. She was fading, one willowy layer of existence at a time. Her voice grew quieter. Her movements slower. Her body thinner. And even her feelings became lighter, her brusque disposition softened.
I tried to call her in the hospital several times. The line was busy. Lines were never busy anymore. People had cell phones. They were either answered or sent to voice mail. I had a bad feeling. I was in the car on the way home from work—or maybe I was in a coffee shop, or picking up groceries for dinner—in any case, I was someplace inconsequential when Dad called. “She passed,” he said in a voice so thin it bordered on unfamiliar to me. He held his breath to control the sobs, but it didn’t work. He was still crying when he asked, “Will you write her eulogy? You were close to her. You’re the writer.”
“Of course,” I answered automatically, as if he’d asked me to fetch him a tissue. My pat response hid the complexity of my feelings. Grandma is dead? She was a phone call away an hour ago. And Dad wants me to write her eulogy? I had never considered writing her eulogy when she passed, or writing any eulogy for that matter. “You’re the writer,” I heard Dad say again, in my head, and the words stuck with me. I’d only ever sent him e-mails of my short stories, stories of the boys that I thought he’d appreciate. I enjoyed writing, but that didn’t make me a writer any more than my love of singing made me a singer. I’d never been “The” anything. Dee was The Singer, The Actress. I was a mother, but no one says, “This is my daughter, The Mother.” And I hadn’t been a teacher long enough to hear myself referred to as The Teacher. When Grandma died, I expected Dad to ask Dee to sing at her funeral, not to ask me to speak. Yet he did ask me. Within minutes of Grandma’s death, I became Cara, The Writer. I didn’t a hundred percent believe the title was appropriate, but I liked it.
Writing Grandma’s eulogy was tough—tough like Grandma. I’d continued at CU for my master’s in education and literacy, so not only was I a brand-new teacher and a single mother when she died, but a part-time master’s student. Getting out of town for her funeral would be a miracle. I was also worried about writing the eulogy. I had to write something worthy of my father’s trust and my grandmother’s memory. I didn’t have time to grieve. Unlike the stories I was used to writing, this one had a deadline. I was accustomed to deadlines on research papers and could hammer those out with the best of ’em, but writing and grieving, childcare and travel, and substitute notes and sleep deprivation made my presence at a podium at two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon feel more like a crapshoot than a foregone conclusion.
In the early A.M. I stared at my pillowcase and formulated my thoughts. I thought of how much I loved her. I conjured memories and feelings, threads of Grandma, but nothing that tied together. In brief moments throughout the day I jotted down notes, but it was like writing with a pen that kept quitting—I had a thought, but couldn’t capture it before it slid away. In the airport I had time before boarding. I sat alert, ready to get it done, but nothing came—plenty of ink this time, but no ideas. I told myself it would come together. Please let it come together.
On the plane, in a window seat, every thought lulled me nearly to sleep, my head giving in toward the window, but I resisted. I sat in near darkness, mine one of only a few overhead lights still on in the cabin. I stopped trying and instead let myself miss my grandmother. I hadn’t seen her in almost two years, since the Tonys, but now that I would never see her again, I missed her in a way I hadn’t before. I thought of her size and how diminished it was the last time I saw her. How happy she was tucked into a booth at a party after Dee won the 2004 Tony. I thought about the stuffed cabbage she taught me to make, and all those handwritten, stained, and wrinkled recipes that her hand had touched—that I could still touch.
I tried to cry quietly, privately. I held the sadness in my throat and let the tears loose. I liked that Grandma was abrupt sometimes, that after a long day she probably didn’t go to bed worried what everyone else was thinking of her—the way I always did. I liked that in her eighties she still found occasion to put on lipstick. I liked that she was generous with her time and her cooking and that she never forgot my birthday. I liked that she’d faced her last years with grace. I liked her. Her sometimes-coarse nature made her a tricky woman to write about, but I decided it was okay with me that she was imperfect. I didn’t need to make her perfect to write her eulogy. I would honor her with honesty.
I started to write. I wrote through the descent into LaGuardia. I wrote in the car. I wrote before bed in the strangeness of her apartment surrounded by partially packed boxes of her belongings. I revised in my head in the shower, made last-minute edits on the way to Gutterman’s Funeral Home. I reviewed it in my head in between nods, hugs, and thank-yous, the words weighing heavy on my diaphragm while I wove through relatives, strangers, and friends.
More and more people arrived; could it be over a hundred? Two hundred? We all milled around while a shell of my grandmother lay in her dark, closed casket. I took comfort in the familiarity of extended family, my aunt and uncle, my cousins. My cousin Andrew would be sharing his thoughts first.
We sat down, Dee and Taye, my dad, his wife, Susie, and me. Andrew got up to the podium, read from his paper. He was choked-up. He talked lovingly about the attributes of driving with Grandma, and how back when he was a teenager, she used to listen in on his phone calls, and once found his pot and flushed it down the toilet. His voice grew distant even though I sat in the front row right in front of him. It was almost my turn.
The rabbi said my name. I thought instantly I would cry. I walked behind the podium. I used a shaky hand to set my papers down. I looked up at a crowd that filled more pews than I could quickly count. I fixated on the faces in the front row, Dee’s and Dad’s especially. I began.
I reminisced about everything from the stationary bike in Grandma’s apartment that no one ever rode, to the afghans she generously knitted for her family and friends as she neared her death. Then I told my favorite Grandma story, my favorite because it said as much about her as it said about my father. And maybe because it said something about me, too.
Grandma never said “I love you”—at least I never heard her. I asked my dad once and he confirmed it, she’d never told him she loved him. Grandma and I had been talking regularly for years, and at the end of each conversation I made a point of saying “I love you” before we got off the phone. I’d say each word deliberately so she couldn’t help but hear it, each word like I was baiting her, luring her into my c
omparatively lush emotional territory. But all she’d say back was “All right, hon,” or “Okay, then,” her polite way of avoiding the sentiment.
Until one day, she slipped.
“I love you, Grandma.”
“Love you too,” she said before she could stop herself. I was stunned. I didn’t want to bring it to her attention and risk making her self-conscious, risk never hearing her say “love you too” again. Instead, because it was a breakthrough worthy of a celebration, I called the one person I knew would appreciate it most.
“She told me she loved me!” I said to Dad.
“Well that makes one of us,” he joked with his squeaky laugh like a short series of hiccups. But I felt sad for him. The dad who used to sing me to sleep and scratch my back, let me dive off his shoulders in the swimming pool, and reliably shared his chocolate-covered almonds at the movies deserved an “I love you” from his mother. I was determined to make it happen.
Grandma’s breakthrough wasn’t a fluke. From that initial conversation, she reliably told me she loved me at the conclusion of every phone call. Eventually, I decided to push her a bit.
“Grandma, you’re getting old,” I reminded her candidly—as if she didn’t know. “You need to tell my dad you love him.”
“What?!” she said. The word climbed up an octave. “Ya fatha knows I love ’im.”
“It’s one thing to know, Grandma. It’s another thing to hear your mother say it to you.” She quickly changed the subject. I didn’t want to make her too uncomfortable, so I let her. Then we got off the phone.
It wasn’t but ten minutes from the end of our phone call that my phone rang.
“I guess you spoke to Grandma,” Dad said, and I knew what was coming. He was already laughing.
“Oh, God,” I said with my hand over my mouth. “What’d she say?”
He did his best Grandma impression and said, “‘What’s wrong with you? You don’t know that I love you?!’” We were in stitches, laughing so hard our stomachs hurt. That was the best Grandma could do, and for my dad, it was good enough.
From the podium, I said my final goodbye to Grandma. I’d decided to write part of the eulogy as a letter to her, what I would have said if she’d answered the phone the night she died. I shared the letter aloud. It ended with the following:
I’ve heard it said that we get to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. We are afforded a better view, a deeper understanding, a clearer picture. Grandma, you knew I was standing on your shoulders, and though in some ways you had settled into the comfort of what was familiar to you, you had no problem holding me up. For that, for indefinitely lending me your shoulders, for being a model of strength, and for the tender, loving man that is my father, I will be forever grateful. I love you.
I looked up, finally able to take in the rows of faces, tissues, futile female efforts to save their makeup. I wiped my eyes and stepped back to my seat. Dee stood up to hug me. “You were so good up there,” she whispered. Then she shook her head from side to side as if to say, I’m speechless.
Apart from my Bio Psych lesson in undergrad, that day was the only time I could remember her watching me. It felt like the only time I stood on a stage and she heard my voice, my words, strong and clear, despite my grief. Even though we were in the shadows of sorrow, my grandmother’s casket several feet behind us, Dee saw me in a new light. In some ways, she saw me at my best. She saw me do something, well, right.
I was grateful for the solid pew behind us because my legs felt like pudding. Before the seat could save me, Dad hugged me. He was pieces of his typical self, and while his arms were all that held me up, I worried that my arms were all that held him together.
“Thank you,” he whispered and cried. “That was perfect. I can’t begin to tell you…” My hands were on his back, my head against his shoulder, and his breathing was choppy against my chest. With my arms full of his sadness, I had a strange awareness of a change in myself. A renewed sense of dignity. Finally, I wasn’t the needy one. I wasn’t the one leaning on others, at least not how I had been. I had something to offer. I’d given something meaningful to my father.
I sat down between Dad and Dee and I stared at the casket until its sharp edges blurred. I thought about Grandma, how we were a couple of hours from entrusting her body to the cold earth. How somewhere in that earth was moisture and nutrients and potential and maybe a seed that managed to sprout in its darkness. And I thought of my darkness, my failures, and my solitude. Everything that had died with my marriage: my hope and idealism, my faith and pride. I thought about all I’d been grieving, including Grandma. And it occurred to me that a part of me would be in the earth with her. That in her end was my new beginning. That she would be proud of me. Proud and still loud.
The service concluded. A distant cousin—my name for any relative within ten years of my age—pulled me in for a surprising bear hug.
“Have you any idea how many years of therapy you saved me?” he asked, with a big smile. I had the sense that I was getting taller. Like somehow I existed in a way I hadn’t ten minutes earlier. Stuart’s “other daughter” had a name and a face and left an impression. I felt like I’d earned a place at the grown-ups’ table. That by acknowledging one void—the loss of Grandma—I began to fill another. The void within me.
How to Make Hello Dollies
Melt a stick of butter and pour it onto the bottom of a 13 × 9–inch shallow baking dish. Then crush a package of graham crackers into crumbs and pour those over the butter. Cover the graham cracker layer with semisweet chocolate chips, and drizzle a can of sweetened, condensed milk over them until the tops of the chips are sticking out like the bobbing heads of children in a swimming pool. Add a layer of coconut and a final layer of chopped walnuts. Bake until they’re golden brown, gooey, and the layers glom together, about thirty minutes. Let them cool before you cut them and then store them in the freezer.
Hello Dollies are best when enjoyed poolside, during prime-time TV game shows, and after blow jobs.
Lesson 12
HOW TO ENVY
Dee bought me my first first-class ticket. She was starring in Wicked at the Apollo Victoria Theatre in London. I flew to visit her and to see the show. Mom and then Jon would take care of the boys while I feigned jet-setter, leaving Annie’s Mac & Cheese, late-night reflective papers about my teaching practice, and my petri dish of a classroom behind. I looked forward to seeing Dee and to the time away. The kids at school and the boys at home had me feeling like a bag of dirty laundry. Perhaps that’s why my first thought was what I suspected all good Jews from Long Island wondered when they got their first first-class ticket: What should I wear?
I refused to go the Ann Taylor route like I’d seen other women do on airplanes—tailored black pants and a pastel camisole under a cashmere cardigan. I never understood traveling in heels or beautiful fabrics that would wrinkle after sitting in them for hours or, worse yet, would get ruined when turbulence shook coffee or red wine off the tray table. I opted to prioritize comfort over style, and splurged on a lavender velvet Juicy Couture sweat suit that I believed befitted my brief stint as a first-class passenger. It was smooth and luscious like sorbet and for a brief moment I considered licking it.
I borrowed an ugly, kelly-green suitcase for the trip. It was one of those Samsonite hard-side retro suitcases popularized in the seventies, and since then more often seen in movies or TV shows than on baggage carousels. But it was hardy, with lots of organizational pockets inside and a four-digit steel combination lock for added safety. (The latter, of course, was completely unnecessary since I had already planned to wear the most expensive item I owned.) In short, the bag was a beast. The lender provided complete training on all of its attributes, how to open it, close it, all the latches, the bells and whistles, and the combination to the lock. I dry-cleaned my sweaters and stocked that doozy full of all my favorite clothes and boots.
I boarded the plane looking forward to my book, my window seat
, and the fact that for nine hours no one would need anything from me. A friendly gentleman took the aisle seat next to me. He had a rugged appeal, was probably in his late forties, and quickly referenced his boyfriend. We enjoyed a glass of champagne together. When he inquired about the purpose of my trip, I was simply too excited to withhold the information. I gushed, my disposition like the champagne, bubbly and effervescent.
“My sister’s starring in Wicked on the West End.”
“Oh, really? Who’s your sister?” he asked.
“Idina Menzel.”
“Wow. She’s terrific. How exciting.”
“It is. I can’t wait to see her.”
He didn’t seem overly impressed and I quickly learned that he much preferred to talk than to listen. He really liked to name-drop, apparently he was BFF with Emma Thompson—one of my all-time favorite actresses—and for a split second I worried that after meeting me, maybe he would say he was BFF with Idina Menzel, too.
What he liked more than talking or name-dropping was drinking red wine. By the time dinner was over, his animated arms were swinging around as he told his loud stories. I lost track of how much he had to drink. The flight attendant kept looking over to check on me, but I was trapped, sandwiched between his flailing arms to my right and the window to my left. Inevitably, he knocked over his wine—yes, on the velvet.
He bobbled out of his seat, flagged down the stewardess to ask for a rag, apologized several times, and, while he was at it, requested another drink to replace the one that was currently in my lap. Fortunately, the stewardess refused to give him any more. He then tried to complain about her to me and I pretended I was asleep until, indeed, I was asleep.
I was relieved when my hungover seatmate and I were able to go our separate ways at the baggage claim. Fortunately, my green suitcase was one of the first bags on the luggage carousel and stood out like Elphaba at Shiz. I made a quick exit to the curb before my seatmate could suggest we share a cab. Dee had ordered a car to meet me at the airport and take me to her place and I wasn’t about to bring him along.
