Making Toast

by Roger Rosenblatt

  “What was your favorite part of the day?” I ask him.

  “When the school bus couldn’t move,” he says. Harris says that might turn out to be Sammy’s favorite part of the whole year.

  On the weekend, we visit the cemetery. Each time, I go with a mixture of need and trepidation, because I know I may break down at the sight of the small rectangle of earth, the boxwood outlining it, the conical brass receptacle for flowers, and the marker, which is so definite. When we chose this spot in December, the nearby office buildings showed through the shorn trees. Since spring the area has burgeoned with dogwoods and magnolias.

  Jessie has brought white carnations; Sammy, a Washington Redskins balloon in the shape of an oversized football, which he plans to release into the air. He seems fragile these days—drifting into faraway stares and silences. Yet he talks more about Amy’s death. Yesterday morning, he asked me again how Mommy died. “The heart stopped. Right?” he said. His first day of kindergarten, when the children were asked to draw pictures of their families, Sammy’s drawing included Amy lying dead on the floor. Catherine Andrews, the children’s psychotherapist, says that Sammy is expressing recollections as they come to him, but that this is a way of expelling them, and they are unlikely to be repeated.

  At the gravesite, Harris asks Sammy if he has something to say. He stands behind the marker and says, “I miss you, Mommy.” He tells Amy about Bubbies’s first teacher in preschool, Ms. Franzetti, and about Jessie’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Salcetti, and about his own, Ms. Merritt. He tells Amy about the balloon, and predicts the Redskins will win the Superbowl. Jessie has no message for Amy today. Sammy asks Harris if he can be buried next to Mommy. Harris says yes, but tells him it’s a very long way off.

  Ginny and I take turns holding Bubbies, who carries a small plastic penguin. When you squeeze its “trigger,” its beak opens and shuts, its little wings flap, and the penguin squawks. On an earlier visit to the cemetery, Bubbies refused to be taken from his car seat, and cried out, “No, no, no!” Today he has his penguin, and is content simply to look around.

  Jessie places the carnations in the conical vessel. Harris writes, “We love you, Mommy” on the football balloon. The children let it go. It flies up in the heavy air and snags on a distant tree. We assure the children that the wind will free it eventually.

  Bubbies’s birthday is in September, so is mine. For his, we gathered Carl, Wendy, and their boys, made a to-do, and gave him a toy grill to further his culinary bent. “How old are you, Bubs?” I asked him. “Two!” he said. For my birthday, Ginny gave me the kayak. Harris gave me an imitation Andy Warhol, which he ordered up on the Internet. It consists of four versions of a picture of Bubbies and me in Disney World last January, me leaning back on a bench, Bubbies standing behind it pulling my hair. In each picture, the hair, eyes, and skin are different colors. Ginny and I hung it in our bedroom where Bubbies likes to look at himself with green hair and me with blue. He comes down to the room all the time, to steal and hide Ginny’s curlers, or try to take my car keys, or to ask, “What is that?” about everything. Our room has become a home, with places for books, shoes, and suitcases, pictures of Amy and the grandchildren on my desk, and the kids bouncing in and out. Sammy will watch TV on our bed when Jessie has commandeered the one upstairs. Jessie wants to know how my IBM Selectric typewriter works. It fascinates her to see me at it—one antique using another.

  One evening, Sammy rushes into the room naked from head to toe. “Boppo!” he says, having just watched a DVD of 101 Dalmatians. “The dalmatian puppies were saved!” I ask, “Sammy, where are your clothes?” He says, “The puppies were going to be skinned for coats!”

  He glances at Amy’s picture. “I miss Mommy,” he says. “Me, too,” I say.

  To the array of the children’s activities have been added martial arts for Sammy, a new gym with balance beams and monkey bars for Bubbies, and yoga for Jess. On Saturday mornings in the fall, she has soccer. Her team, the Flames, wears uniforms of blazing yellow. Games are played simultaneously on three adjacent fields. Rob Hazan, the Flames’ coach, is married to Jill, a high school friend of Harris’s. Jill and the other mothers sit together on collapsible canvas chairs in the cool fall air, and Ginny sits with them.

  This is the way it was when our children were small—parents loosely convened for recitals, plays, pageants, basketball, Little League. In Vermont, where we rusticated for a year between my jobs at the Washington Post and at Time in New York, we cheered in the bleachers of drafty school gyms with John in his stroller, as Carl hit a winning jump shot in a local basketball tournament and Amy scored all her team’s points in an elementary school game—four. In Bethesda it is as Ginny noted: she is leading Amy’s life. With one mother, she makes plans for a trip to the National Zoo; with another, a date to see Madagascar. The women speak of their children’s teachers. They praise, they complain, they collaborate, they gossip.

  On Halloween, we go to the Burning Tree School to admire Sammy, Jessie, and the other children in their costumes and to watch a parade. Jessie’s second-grade teacher, Deirdre Salcetti, is a creative, quick-witted blonde in her forties, with a you’re-safe-with-me smile, which readily surrenders to laughter. She has the body of a gymnast. She teaches the yoga classes. Dressed as a bee today, she has antennas on her head and wears translucent wings and a tag that reads, “Don’t worry. Bee happy.” Mrs. Salcetti stands before the class. “I’m not going to start until everyone is quiet.” The children prepare to present themselves to the visitors.

  A girl steps forward as Indiana Jones, and explains who she is. Another girl appears as one of the Jedi. Katie, who has no hair, is a wizard. I surmise that she is being treated for cancer, but am told that she has a genetic disorder. Her face is startlingly white. She smiles readily. A girl named Amy is a witch with a cat and a broom.

  “Will you be riding your broom later?” asks Mrs. Salcetti.

  “I’m a good witch,” says Amy.

  Here comes Dorothy, carrying Toto in a basket and wearing glittery red shoes. She clicks her heels three times. Here is Michael, the Incredible Hulk. Jaraad is an alien with a green face. Others arrive: a Tootsie Roll, an Eloise, an Uncle Sam, a Bride of Frankenstein with a white stripe in her hair. “I really need to see better with this helmet on,” says another Star Wars character. I ask a boy in an Obama mask, “Are you running for President?” He says, “No.” Jessie appears. Confident and forceful, she announces she’s a Power Ranger.

  The parents and Ginny and I are asked to proceed outside for the Halloween parade. We pass signs, mottos, and aphorisms of encouragement on the school walls. A painted dog balances a ball on its nose over the words, “No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.” I greet Andrew, an autistic boy who was in Jessie’s first-grade class last year. He had a special teacher to help him. He used to ask me, “Are you my Daddy?” I cannot determine if he recognizes me, but he gives me a hug.

  Sammy’s kindergarten class is lined up in the hall, shepherded by Pam Merritt. Ms. Merritt has the independent, high-style look of the favorite aunt, regal posture, a blues-singer’s smoky voice, and wears red sneakers. Sammy is Ironman, his new number-one superhero. He sees us and waves.

  Gypsies, angels, Spidermen, Supermen. They file past the crowd and kick up the fallen leaves. Harris, who has taken off early from work, joins us. Jessie and Sammy march by and light up at the sight of him. Fathers and mothers step out of the pack to take pictures. Children pose before the red-brick wall or under the trees of muted autumn colors. At the appearance of a girl dressed as Sherlock Holmes, Ginny and I exchange a look. One Halloween, when Carl was eight and Amy five, they had a battle royal over who would dress as Sherlock Holmes and who as Dr. Watson. Carl said, “I’m the oldest, so I’m Holmes.” Amy said, “Dr. Watson was the oldest, too. You’re Watson.” They each dressed as Holmes, referring to the other as an imposter.

  Bubbies sings and dances to “Toddler Favorites.” Ginny leads him: “Wher
e is Thumbkin, where is Thumbkin?” They sing, “Here I am, here I am.” Ginny employs the unnervingly precise voice of the former schoolteacher. She knows all the hand gestures that accompany the lyrics. “Here I am.” She holds her thumbs in front of her. “How are you today, sir? Very well, I thank you.” She wiggles her thumbs as if they are talking to each other. “Run away. Run away.” She hides her thumbs behind her back. Bubbies is mesmerized, as am I.

  “How do you know to do that stuff?” I ask.

  “I’m programmed,” she says. “Scary, isn’t it?”

  I tend to do whatever Bubbies says, but Harris talks to him as if he were in his midtwenties. (He also has taken to calling him James now that he is in school, and with some resistance, I generally go along.) One Sunday morning, before I packed to get ready for my drive to Quogue, James was in his usual place at the kitchen table, telling people where he wanted them to sit. He does that. If you take a seat he does not sanction, he will shake a fist at you. “Sit here”—some other place. Only he seems to know the proper assignments. That morning Ginny had taken the wrong seat, so James let her have it. “Mimi sit here!”—indicating the other side of the table. Harris entered and told him, “Don’t worry about where people sit.” The off hand tone of Harris’s command had me laughing for much of my drive. I called Harris from Quogue at the end of the afternoon. “Do you realize,” I said, “that by telling James not to dictate where people sit, you’ve deprived him of sixty percent of his subject matter?”

  “Be that as it may,” Harris said. “He hasn’t told anyone where to sit all day.”

  “Boppo! Look at this!” Jessie shows me her new Book of World Records. “It has the Yankees in it!” I say, “So? How many World Series have the Yankees won?” She doesn’t need to check the book. “Twenty-six,” she says. “Just for that,” I tell her, “grab your bags. We’re off to Paris for the weekend!” She raises her clenched fists at her sides as though she were carrying suitcases, and trots toward the front door.

  “You know, Jessie, when I was a little girl…”

  “Oh, Boppo!”

  My teaching load for the fall term consists of two courses, and remains light. On Mondays I teach a graduate course in modern poetry at the Stony Brook main campus on the north shore of Long Island, and an MFA course in novel-writing at the Southampton campus on Tuesdays. The Southampton campus is a fifteen-minute drive from our house. Kevin comes over on Tuesday mornings before I go off to teach, and we sit in the kitchen and talk. He never wants coffee or anything to eat. We sit across the table from each other and talk about the Yankees, the Mets, and the Jets (the one team we agree on), or whatever happens to be going on. We also phone each other from time to time.

  I come from a society of talkers. He does not. “Do you believe in mediums?” he asks one morning. I tell him no, though not dismissively, because it is clear that he and Cathy want to believe in them. Cathy sees a medium, who connects her with Stephen. Cathy feels that Stephen’s spirit is nearby, watching over the family. She reports that lights go off and on in the house on their own to signal Stephen’s presence. “I went over to Stony Brook and looked around where he used to walk, and I knew he was with me,” Kevin says. I just listen. “I keep paying for his cell phone,” he says, “to hear his voice.”

  Shirley Kenny, the Stony Brook president, has been kind and attentive to the Stakeys, as she has to our family. I only learned of the death of the Kennys’ son after Amy died. So many of the people we have heard from during the year have lost children, old and young—many who were friends or acquaintances for years but who had never mentioned the deaths, as if they belonged to a secret club.

  Kevin comes over when I am not around, as well. Since finishing the playhouse, he has made other improvements, redoing a section of the third floor so that we’d have a comfortable place for Ligaya in the summers, and shoring up a crumpling part of the basement ceiling, which required rebuilding most of the deck that covers it. I told him I didn’t like repair jobs like that because no one could tell how much money was involved. He said he’d put up a plaque on the deck, indicating the cost. Often he comes over just to check that everything is okay.

  Today he worries about his fellow builders and contractors on Long Island. “Nobody’s building, nobody’s using carpenters. The lumber mill in Riverhead laid off over half of its workers,” he says. He doesn’t know how his friends will survive in the recession. “Do you think Obama will help?” he asks. I say I do. We remain quiet for a while. He says, “Did I tell you I saw a video of Stephen playing his drum in the band?”

  Ordinarily, I don’t believe in teachers letting students in on too much of their private lives. But I intentionally have told my students about Amy and our family situation. The students hear rumors, so my coming straight out with it clears the air, and helps remove the possibility that they will get overly interested in me and not in the material. I do not wish to play the mysterious professor with the unspoken sorrow. Mainly, I’d like them to realize that we’re all in the same boat. Every one of them has experienced one grief or another. I tell them about Amy only once.

  I like my students this term, which makes for better classes—freer, more far-reaching discussions, and the possibility of surprises. One day, a thoughtful and quiet young woman in my modern poetry class was making a reference to the Metaphysicals. Out of the blue, she said, “I don’t like John Donne.” Not like John Donne? “He has nothing original to say,” she said. I gave her the form-rescues-content argument, but she remained unpersuaded, and I had to admit she may have had a point.

  In early November, the class took up Anne Sexton. I had never thought much of Sexton, judging her to be in a minor league compared to such contemporaries as Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. But the students and I were getting into “The Truth the Dead Know,” and I liked the poem better than I’d remembered. “This line, ‘In another country people die.’ What does it mean?” I asked the class. A young man said, “It means that death happens to other people.”

  “So why are ‘orchid’ and ‘cello’ alike?” I ask Jessie and Sammy at breakfast. (The Word for the Morning is “orchid.” Yesterday it was “cello.”) No response. “Think about the ‘h,’” I tell them. Jessie says, “The ‘h’ is silent in ‘orchid’ but missing in ‘cello.’” Sammy says, “But you can hear the ‘h’ in ‘cello.’” I smile.

  Whenever I get to New York, John and I have dinner. He speaks of Amy with a special melancholy. Amy and Carl, having been less than three years apart, were close in the way of brothers and sisters. John was close to Amy differently. Because she was nine years older, she fluctuated between being a guardian, a teacher, and a buddy. After Carl went off to college, the two of them joined forces. They listened to the same music. They watched Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place devotedly, barring me from watching with them because I made too many blasphemous remarks. One remark was too many. They played the video game Sonic the Hedgehog. Amy would kid with John when he was small: “Why are you offering opinions?” she would say. “You’re not even a person.” John learned the advantages of straight talk from Amy, and the value of friends. He has retained his friends not only from college and high school, but from grade school as well. Ginny and I have a picture of the two of them when Amy was twelve and John three, licking the same ice cream cone in Central Park.

  He is even less likely to speak of his feelings than Harris or I, though if I should mention a sad moment I experienced in thinking about Amy, he will allow that he has had similar moments. He plays things so close to the vest that whenever he says something self-revealing, it carries a profound weight. Over dinner at our regular Japanese restaurant a few weeks after Amy died, he told me “I’m starting not to think about her every day. I feel guilty about that.” On the dark, cold morning of Amy’s burial, we each approached the casket, still above ground. John stood there a very long time, whispering his thanks to her, telling her how much she had meant to him.

  Amy’s death may have had t
he salutary effect of instilling a new daring in John. For the past few years, he has been treading water as a paralegal in a firm where he is cherished by people who make his work a pleasure. But they also realize that he has other ambitions that play to his bent as a humorous critic. He has always wanted to write. In the time since Amy died, he has finished his first screenplay, a sharp satire of his generation.

  November 25, a dank, cool morning in Quogue. Ginny calls on my cell phone as I pull into the post office parking lot. She tells me that last night James cried in Harris’s arms. “Mommy,” he said, as if calling her. “When is Mommy coming home?” He has never said such a thing. He was just starting to talk when Amy died. All this time, has he been thinking she was simply away? Ginny says Harris told him Mommy is dead and is not coming home, and in the morning James seemed fine. Immediately after we hang up, a friend calls. He asks where I am. I tell him I have to look around to be sure. He thinks I’m joking.

  A custom in our family, as it is in many families, is to say, “Love you” at the end of phone conversations. “Love you”—with an up-and-down lilt like two musical notes. Amy and I used to talk twice or three times a week. There was rarely anything momentous in our conversations. Once in a while she would ask my advice about whether she should shorten or lengthen her days of practice, or she would mention an injustice in her office. Sometimes I’d ask her to read something I was writing, as I did with other family members. Mostly, we chatted about the children, or made plans for a pending visit. The week before she died, we spoke a couple of times about our coming to Bethesda for Christmas. “Love you.”