Anna in the Afterlife

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  Patient is a seventy-seven-year-old white female looking and acting younger than her stated age. She is extremely lively, vivacious, intelligent, sharp, and well-verbalized and expresses herself precisely and extremely well, has an appropriate and charming manner not displaying at all any handicaps of advanced age.

  A man like this, with framed degrees covering the walls of his office, should know charming and vivacious when he saw it.

  Patient admits she frequently ruminates about her condition, is “disconsolate” (her vocabulary is superb), and while otherwise she does not feel her age at all, she is certain that the quality of her life has fundamentally deteriorated.

  In summarizing Anna’s personal life in the document, he added, “The patient has an older stepsister with whom she has little contact because this sister values beauty and riches while patient cherishes integrity and inner worth. Her younger sister values knitting and collecting little knickknacks while the patient is a devotee of culture, art, and music.”

  Anna had always wanted an objective assessment of her attributes from a neutral (but astute) observer. Surely the doctor had nothing to gain from all these compliments. At the end he wrote under “Mental Status”: Patient is a pretty, well-groomed, very well-verbalized, attractive, wiry lady, energetic, full of life, vivacious, and delightful. She relates extremely well without any hesitation, is capable of expressing warm emotions. She is obviously a sophisticated musician who has a great deal of general knowledge of music and art; she is well trained, competent and enthusiastic. Her memory is excellent. She is sharp and quick, responds appropriately to all questions and her concentration abilities are undiminished. She feels well-appreciated and loved by strangers but particularly also by her family, her sister, and two daughters, with whom she appears to have excellent relationships, as well as with her grandchildren.

  Anna wondered, just for the briefest second, if this expert doctor had been expertly fooled by her. With all her glissandos, with all her thundering chords and harmonies ringing in her ears, with all the applause and love she had invented, didn’t she, just for a second, feel the terrible drumbeats of loneliness and of terror? What if she were nothing but nothing? What if under all that flattery, all the chattery words came to a bushel of lies? What if the truth were known about her? She would never admit to her doubts. She would drown them out with boogie-woogie. She would suffocate them with Rachmaninoff. She would keep the image of Anna, as she needed it, shined bright as a silver candlestick.

  Now Sammy lay in a closed cedar wood coffin in the Vale-Of-Tears Chapel while some girl rabbi was addressing a sad little crew of seven or eight mourners. Janet and Carol, who had to be there anyway to make arrangements for the disposition of Anna, had decided to pay respects to Sammy, as well as to see how funerals were done, the better to plan for their mother’s in two days.

  Although Anna had no doubts that women were superior to men in every way and her general scorn for rabbis was unshakable, she could see no reason why this little rabbinette, this homely girl with a quavering voice, this skinny maruchka, should be standing there in the place of some old rebbe with a long white beard. A funeral speech required some experience—how could you talk about death if you were barely out of bobbie socks? Besides, the girl was ungifted. She spoke pure boilerplate: “Samuel Mishkin was a good husband, a good father, a good family man.”

  To take a fee for this kind of trash was highway robbery.

  Sammy’s two daughters sat looking at their laps, having God knows what memories of their father. What did Anna know except that their relations with him were not so good. The problem had partly to do with how many blonde women he favored after he divorced their mother—and in such fast succession. Still, all the mourners looked baffled and offended at the paucity of what could be found to be said about the dead man.

  Anna would have said plenty: how he pressed flowers from the desert blooms into the pages of books, how he helped the old people at the senior center to do their taxes (he had been an accountant and a good one). How he had a fine appreciation of Mozart (which could not be said of every accountant).

  The girl rabbi was already opening her little booklet (the one the mortuary gave to everyone) to say some prayer when Anna’s daughter, Janet, stood up in the pew with her hand raised.

  “Excuse me, but would you mind if I said a few words about Sammy? He and my mother were very good friends for over thirty years.” The first wife looked worried, as if news of another blonde bombshell were going to come out of the woodwork, but her older daughter whispered something to her that cleared up the matter. “Please do say something,” Sammy’s daughter urged Janet, who took the podium.

  “After my father died, Sammy’s friendship brightened my mother’s life. He stopped in often at her antique shop. He took her on beautiful nature walks in the desert.” (Anna was relieved she did not mention the lunches of hard boiled eggs.) “The two of them often went to concerts together and listened to records of classical music, which they both adored. One Halloween Sammy came to our house just as we were about to go trick-or-treating with our three little girls. We still have the picture of Sammy with them, sitting on the couch between the wicked witch and the fairy godmother, with the baby, Little Bo Peep, on his lap.”

  Sammy’s daughters were dabbing at their eyes. His first wife was nodding her head. Even the new lady friend was smiling sadly.

  Anna was proud of Janet, making something decent out of this affair. She said a little prayer to no one: “She should only do as well for me.

  An enormous Russian woman with a gold ring on every finger turned out to be the “grief counselor” for Anna’s bereaved girls. She had long red fingernails and wore a flowing chiffon pantsuit that sparkled with silver threads. Opening her notebook, she began gathering facts:

  “So, of course your mother was Jewish?”

  “Yes, Jewish,” Janet said.

  “So—her Jewish name please.”

  Anna’s girls were nonplussed. “What was Mom’s Jewish name?”

  “I think it was something like Shura Sheindel.”

  “I thought it was Rifka.”

  “No, that was Grandma, I think.”

  “Look, the cemetery needs a Jewish name for the records and for when the rabbi says the prayer.”

  “We’re not having rabbi,” Anna’s girls said in unison. “Our mother didn’t want a rabbi,” Janet added.

  “Honey, we’re not burying a pet here. Don’t you want Anna Goldman to depart with dignity? What kind of funeral can it be for your mother without a rabbi?”

  Because the funeral had to be on a Sunday, there would be a charge of $200 to open the grave and $200 more for overtime. Because the mortuary didn’t want the coffins shifting around in wet weather, they required a two-piece sealed concrete grave liner, an additional $400. “You wouldn’t want your mother to end up under the plaque of Hymie Schwartz, would you?” their counselor prompted.

  “Does the concrete liner keep out the bugs?” Carol inquired.

  “Honey, nothing keeps the bugs out. I’m sorry to tell you this, but even the $10,000 bronze casket doesn’t do the trick. Dust unto dust, it’s the way of the world.” She checked her list. “You brought clothes?”

  Janet handed over a paper bag that the woman peeked into.

  “A bathrobe? You want your mother buried in a bathrobe?”

  “We want her comfortable,” Carol said. It was Anna’s favorite red quilted bathrobe with little blue anchors on it. She could see that one of her daughters had replaced the plastic buttons with new gold ones for the occasion. (Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that her sister Gert had taught the girls to sew.)

  “You want anything buried with her?”

  “Her book of Chopin nocturnes. It’s there in the bag.”

  “A musical mother, how nice.”

  The girls stared at one another and inhaled deeply. Janet consulted her watch. The Russian Czarina went down the list of costs: the transfer of the body to
Burning Bush, the use of the refrigerated holding area, hairdresser, cosmetics, bathing, and the placing of the features in repose as well as the fees for the memorial arrangement coordinator, the personnel for traffic service, ushers, flower arrangements, clerical support, memorial prayer booklets, acknowledgment cards, seven-day yahrzeit candle, filing fee, death certificate, burial permit, and sales tax.

  “We have one copy of the death certificate here. You’ll have to pay to have others made; you’ll need them for social security, insurance, other legal matters. And you’ll need an announcement in the paper. Do you want it mentioned that your mother died from Alzheimer’s?” the Russian asked.

  “Alzheimer’s!” Anna’s daughters cried at the same moment.

  “So it says on the death certificate.”

  “It’s wrong. The doctor, if he thinks my mother’s mind was gone—he’s the one with Alzheimer’s.”

  “They often write down Alzheimer’s, it covers everything,” the Russian said. “If the doctor had to fill this out on New Year’s Eve, as I see he did, he made it easy for himself.”

  “We have to have it changed,” Janet stated. “She died of pneumonia.”

  “Darling, what’s the difference? You want to spend a week calling up people? You want to hold up the wheels of bureaucracy?”

  “Never mind,” Carol said. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” Carol turned to Janet. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  “We want to be sure that no one uses makeup on her. Our mother doesn’t want any makeup.”

  “Look, girls, I understand your mother gave you a lot of instructions, she sounds like a tough cookie, but you’ll want a little makeup if the skin turns black or blue, and it sometimes does—especially since you have to wait so many days I’d say, go for makeup.”

  “We’re not having an open casket, so no one will be looking,” Janet said.

  “You’ll be looking.” The woman leaned forward till her earrings jangled. “You’ll have to identify the body. We can’t bury anyone unless we’re sure it’s the right one in the box.”

  In Anna’s opinion, once the girls got to the casket room, they both looked faint. They hadn’t eaten for hours; it was way past lunch time. The theory here was to wear them down and then give them the hard sell. If only they remembered her instruction that for a hole in the ground the cheapest piece of plywood would do.

  The $10,000 bronze casket was the first thing to be seen in the room, gleaming, satin-lined, with quilted pillow, burnished walnut edges, a miniature oil painting on the underside of the lid to fold down over the face of the deceased. The idea of the lid coming down, shutting down, locking down, was enough to make a person want to be scattered at sea. The Russian was leading her daughters among the aisles of the showroom: one level down from bronze was mahogany, then walnut, then maple, then pine, then cedar (Sammy had got cedar), and in the far, far corner, almost hidden from view, was the cheesecloth-covered plywood box. Cheesy. That was the one Anna wanted. Take it, take it, she sent telepathy to her girls. Don’t let them shame you with this business about You don’t want the cheapest coffin for your mother, do you? You do! You do!

  Bless them, they did.

  By the time they had ordered the headstone, the bronze plaque that had to match Abram’s (but it would have a piano instead of a Jewish star at its center), it was dinnertime. The girls spent another half hour spelling out what would be engraved on the bronze plaque, the simplest of words:

  ANNA GOLDMAN

  1907 (EMBOSSED GRAND PIANO) 1997

  BELOVED WIFE MOTHER

  GRANDMOTHER GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

  Was Anna really a great-grandmother? Carol’s oldest (adopted) son, the one in the army, already had two babies. (Were his babies really her great-grandbabies, did they count?)

  Her girls now had to pay the bill and Janet was looking at the figures. A fortune, a waste of money. The funeral business, it was a gold mine! There was never a lack of customers. What her funeral was costing came to more than Anna and Abram had ever paid for a vacation, for a year’s rent, for a car. She should live so long before she’d do this again!

  But finally her girls got out of there. The sky was dark. The two of them were faint from low blood sugar. Carol drove them toward home; they discussed where they might stop to eat. Maybe Shakey’s Pizza was a good idea. Yes, they’d order cheese and mushrooms. But then it would have to be baked. Impossible to wait that long.

  “It has to be fast food. Let’s go anywhere! The first place we see!” Janet said.

  Carol turned off the freeway as soon as they saw the lights of Clodhopper’s. It was a hamburger place they never went to, mainly because the restaurant kept sides of beef hanging in the window. “The best beef in town,” was their motto, but to see it there—half a cow on every silver hook, complete with fat, sinew, muscle and bone—didn’t do much for the appetite.

  “It doesn’t matter, I’ll eat anything,” said Carol, who was these days on the verge of giving up red meat. “This day has been so surreal. Bringing clothes for the corpse of our mother, buying a coffin, picking a piano for the tombstone. Now we’ll be eating dead cows. What kind of nightmare is this?” They were rushing forward with their trays, ordering giant hamburgers, curly seasoned fries, and huge root beers, when a man came up to Carol and put his arm around her.

  “Hey there,” he whispered and Carol nearly passed out. For there was the image of her father, a replica of Abram, the ghost of her father giving her a hug.

  “Oh my God! It’s Billy Goldman!” Janet cried.

  “Billy? It can’t be!”

  But it was Billy, Abram’s nephew, son of his brother Sol, who carried the form and face of the family that so eerily matched the form and face of their father.

  Anna’s girls had not seen this cousin of theirs for more than ten years, though he lived somewhere in Los Angeles and cleaned pools for a living. His wife, Lizzie, came up behind Billy and also hugged Janet and Carol, careful not to tip their trays.

  “Come join us, we’ve got a table over there,” Lizzie said. “We never come out this way, you know. But Billy had to do some business around here…”

  “We never come here either!” Carol declared.

  “So here we are. It’s fate.”

  “Our mother just died,” Carol had to blurt out. It couldn’t wait till after the condiments were added, the root beers pumped from the fountain machines.

  “No!” Lizzie said. “Oh, the poor thing.”

  “Yes! She died on New Year’s Eve. We just came from the cemetery. Just now!” Janet affirmed. “The funeral is on Sunday.” She was clearly excited to be reporting this to a blood relation.

  “No kidding,” Billy said, shaking his head. “Hey, no kidding.”

  “She died, after seven years in a nursing home. She suffered so much!”

  “Gee, I’m sorry to hear that. I wish I’d known. Maybe I could have come out to see her. I should have called you guys. Stayed in touch. But you know how it is.”

  Anna definitely knew how it was. Abram and Sol hadn’t been in touch for years either, even though the two brothers lived in Los Angeles a few miles apart. When Abram was dying of leukemia, Sol hadn’t even come to the hospital. He told Anna the idea of seeing his brother so sick broke him up too much. The truth was there had been bad blood between them from 1937 when the brothers had a falling out in Cleveland where they were in business together for a year. Anna could never forget what happened when they had let Sol use their apartment for a few days. Even twenty years later, when the brothers went into the upholstery business together in Florida, Anna felt that Sol treated her as if she were no one. Still, tonight, all the old venom felt distant. Besides this was Billy, not Solly, and he hadn’t betrayed the family in any way. He was just a not-too-bright kid, good-hearted but simple. Tonight his meeting with her daughters seemed an actual miracle, the flesh of Abram come to life just when her girls needed comfort the most. They kept hanging on to Billy, touching him, taking in his l
ooks—this big tall man, round-shouldered, with dark curly hair, a strong back, a sweet-natured brow, blue-green eyes: the sweetness of their father alive in front of them. Was Anna mistaken, or was the gentle love of their father actually looking out at them from Billy’s eyes?

  “God, these hamburgers are great—” Billy said. “And you can pile on everything—onions, pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, hot chili peppers, whatever they have out there.”

  The four of them set their trays on a table. Billy said, “Go on. Dig in, you’ll love every bite.”

  Anna’s girls dug in, filled their mouths full with bloody rare meat, drew the bubbly root beer up through their straws, bringing themselves back to life. They had been emptied out and weary, but now they grew calm and stronger.

  “How’s Uncle Sol?” they asked, and Billy shrugged.

  “He’s a recluse now. He can’t play handball anymore, his knees are ruined, so he goes to the senior citizen center and plays bingo. He’s an old man, you know. Since my mother died, he’s gotten a little crazy.”

  It serves him right for what he did to us, Anna thought. But this was not the moment to bring up old grudges.

  Billy leaned back in his chair. Such a handsome, powerful boy (what boy? He was at least fifty-five years old!)—tilting the front legs off the ground, the way Abram used to do. Anna felt a quiver in her soul, a memory of the happy part of love and sex, the longing and yearning, the flirtatious way she used to feel when Abram came up the walk of the Brooklyn house with a sprig of lilac for her, picked from the tree in the garden.

  She was getting all stirred up. She could smell the lilacs. She was dressed in the brown silk of her wedding day. This dying and leaving life and its memories was not so easy as she thought. As much as Anna had longed for death, she was having some trouble letting go.

  “You will live till the very last minute, and after that you won’t be there to care,” she had assured her children. Now she was not so sure. Here she was, after death (though before burial), and she was still there to care.