by Fiona Maazel
Foolish is he who frets at night,
And lies awake to worry:
A weary man when morning comes,
He finds all as bad as before.
Thud.
Two wooden stakes stood on the plain,
On them I hung my clothes:
Draped in linen, they looked well born,
But naked, I was a nobody.
I imagine the last lines of these poems, in their condemnation, function better when spoken aloud, as per the oral tradition in which they were conceived. Too bad the written word has supplanted the oral tradition. Sometimes I think that if not for the addicts in recovery, there’d be no oral tradition at all. I mean, story is the fulcrum of recovery, the biggest part of the program by far.
Stanley pinches my leg. I worry I’d fallen asleep, only it’s not me, but Mother. So I pinch her leg and think we could get a relay going since the guy next to her could probably use a fillip. And the lady next to him, she’s not looking too vital, either. I bet we could snake this game all the way to the back of the church. I bet—but then I realize Stanley’s been looking at me and I am ashamed. Some people can accord their behavior with context. They can arrange their feelings like the spray on a casket. I do not excel in this department. Worse, it’s not that I’ll be at a funeral and laugh because it’s funny. I’ll just laugh. And maybe, from strain of withholding laughter, I will get aroused. And maybe, from horror of arousal, I will get a headache that hurts so bad, I’ll end up crying anyway.
Bottom line: I loved Agneth and with her death accrues just one more reason to follow suit.
It takes Dag Bersvendsen three minutes to mount the stage. Polio nailed him at twenty, and now he’s got age to contend with. Not sure if someone should help him and if so, who? An usher? Me? Each step accomplished lets out some tension from the room. By the time I decide to help, he’s made it. Made it insofar as he hasn’t passed out. Reaching the mike is another story. An usher brings him a footstool. But how’s he gonna get on it? This is awful.
Dag and Mother grew up on the same block in Bergen. They were lovers and then they were engaged and then he got polio and she split. How to develop a million-dollar company selling hats on the streets in Bergen? How to do so with a crippled beau? You don’t. You come to America and make trilbies. You get some guy to wear your trilby in the season’s blockbuster, and for the attendant photo shoot. You furnish your sidesweep with quills and orchids. You sell your millinery to the Queen of England.
Most important, you keep your lovers close. So Dag, he runs the international division of Mother’s company. Rides it like a woman. Without mercy. Think those crutches with the arm cuff hold him back? Think he won’t mount that footstool? Think again!
He asks for a moment of silence. For Agneth Monsen and her family. For the plague victims out West. And while we’re at it, for the entire country since at this point, nothing short of prayer can save us.
The memorial closes with Bach. Something from an oratorio. It bellows through the church, whose acoustics distill the tin from every voice. Treacle, treble, not much difference when you’re blue. We stand. I have never understood traditions that straddle events opposed to each other, like how at a wedding and a memorial, you don’t get up until the family does. Whence this premium on family? And who thinks the tradition does a family good? Display is torture. I’ve just wept my eyeballs to soup, look at me! Or, in my case and thus worse, I have not wept at all, I am frigid, behold the face of dispassion!
Raymond is waiting by the double doors. Light at the end of the tunnel Raymond. Mother rushes to his side. Get me out of here, is what she’s thinking. Only reason I know is that I’m thinking the same thing. Unfortunately, the task of seeing everyone out falls to me, especially since Raymond, in special-ops fashion, has kidnapped Mother under cover of nothing, and still no one saw them go. Others MIA include Wanda, Stanley, and Hannah. Haven’t seen her since naked, I was a nobody, when she was huddled on the floor, knees drawn, head down. I could have tipped her over with a nudge of the toe.
I check out the spot and find evidence to suggest she was just here. Opened bottle of soda, effervescent. Marble warm to touch. If Converse, then tread, which muddies around the reliquary sealed in glass. I find her on the lee side, biting her thumb.
“Aggie would have hated the memorial,” she says.
“I know.”
“Think she’s really out there someplace?”
“God, I hope so.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. When you believe in something so much, I think you should be right. Or at least never have to find out you spent your life being wrong.”
“I heard Wanda say you were going to Texas. Do you have to?” The look on her face is like when the Death Star disables its shield just long enough to get blasted to shit.
“Afraid so. I have no say in these things.”
Star rearmed. “How long?”
“Month? Not sure. But I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hannah, stop that. It’s true. You think I want to be going just now?”
She presses her forehead to the glass, but since now is not the time to upend the reliquary, I suggest we leave. Also, I can’t summon the wherewithal to continue charading with my baby sister.
She looks up. “And help Loretta with the squab kebobs? I hate our life.”
“Oh, come on. Wouldn’t want to miss the speeches. Remember the guy at Mel’s engagement who read a poem about not slapping your wife? I hope he’s there.”
Hannah’s face brightens, and I realize that party was the last time we had fun together.
“Remember the Kraut?” she says. “The guy with the bubble head?”
I nod. “But can you not call him a Kraut? I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this kind of thing.”
She snorts. “It’s just summer camp.”
“It’s for terrorists!”
“Shut up. You know Indra’s not allowed to talk to me anymore, thanks to you.”
“Still?”
She gives me the evil eye. Eyes. I follow her down the center aisle. We are the only ones left, excepting church staff. One guy gives me a DVD of the memorial—that was quick—while the others sweep the floor. Amazing how fast service flowers shed their petals.
At the apartment, people are talking in low voices. Jumbo Prawn looks frantic. She has prepared for fifty; we are ninety. Already we’re out of deviled eggs and sturgeon caviar; the black olive tapenade Brie toast can’t come out of the oven fast enough; and the wonton sampler, forget it. I pocket a handful of bourbon pecans for later, and send Hannah to lay claim to at least one squab kebob. But she has her own plans. She’s traded her skirt for garb that keeps with the Converse. If Mother sees her in those jeans with the hundred-dollar fade, she will have a fit.
Stanley appears by my side.
“Thanks for waiting for me,” I say. “Got real fun back there after you left.”
“And miss a ride with Raymond? The man has nunchucks in the glove compartment.”
“He does not.”
“Yeah, but he could.”
I take a long look at Stanley. He didn’t use to be like this. I think the change is for the better, but in no universe does this mean I’m right.
He’s got a glass of Pinot in each hand, and a couple bottles on the mantel. We sit in a loveseat. I tell him to make like a lump and stare out at the room so that together, in our bleakness, we will appear remote and forbidding. Then again, the strategy presumes tact, that our guests have it, which they don’t. There’s a man coming our way. Says: “May I?”
Stanley nods and invites the guy to take his seat. I’ve got blur vision, mostly by choice. But one hates to be impolite. I turn my head and focus. It’s the little man from the memorial. Seems pleasant enough.
“I’m Dan.”
“Lucy.”
Pause.
“You’re Lucy?”
Nod. Nod again. This
is awkward. I say whatever comes to mind next. “Hate to be frank, but you are incredibly little. I mean, I saw you in the church, which, now that I think about it, is weird since you don’t exactly stand out.”
“I’m Dan.”
I look around to see if anyone finds this as odd as I do. Who is this guy?
“Who are you?”
“Dan.”
“Right. Lucy. Bourbon pecan?”
“Thanks, no.”
We both sit forward and clasp our hands, me because what’s to talk about, him because his feet won’t reach the floor otherwise.
Still, I decide to try. I go: “Lovely to see you. Lovely services.”
He puts in hearing aids, which explains a lot. “So you’re Lucy?”
“Yep. You?”
“A friend of your grandmother’s.”
“Agneth had friends?”
“Friends might be overstating it. We were close once.”
Addicts do not like to feel surprised, which is just as well since drugs so deaden your sensitivities you can barely register the brass tacks, say: I have to pee, or: My skin’s on fire. So the little man, I take it in stride and assess. He is little, I got that part. He shuffles as he walks. He is married. Skin manifold and pale. Beard long enough for curlers. And eyes, these blue eyes so recessed and bright, they spangle.
I say: “The navy man, right?”
He nods. Says it was a long time ago. That he read about Aggie’s death in the paper. “But,” he adds, “I’ve kept tabs on her over the years. And I saw her recently, just a couple weeks ago, in fact.”
Okay, now I am surprised. So maybe it’s not the surprise I dislike, but having to accept that other people know things I don’t.
“You saw her? Where?”
“She came to my place.”
“What did she want?”
“To see me.”
“Yeah, but she must have said something.”
He shakes his head. “I took her to lunch. We tried to catch up on fifty years in half an hour. She was so beautiful, you know, when we first met.”
I uncork one of Stanley’s bottles. “Wine?”
“No, but thank you. Bad liver.”
“So what happened between you two, anyway? Aggie mentioned it once, a couple months ago, but her account was kinda a sparse.”
He takes a cigar out of a Ziploc in his pocket. It’s been chewed halfway down the trunk. I ask if he’s gonna light that. He says no, his wife can’t stand the smell, and fits it in the hinge of his lips, passing it from one side of his mouth to the other. I notice tobacco slop in his beard.
“It’s a simple story,” he says. “As simple as it gets. I wanted to marry her. We tried, but life got in the way. It always does, it seems.
“Aggie said she saw your wife once.”
“Yes. My wife is a wonderful woman. We celebrate forty-nine years together next month.”
“Did you ever tell her? About Agneth?”
He looks at me and smiles, and just now I can see why Aggie loved him. “No,” he says. “There are some things best kept secret.”
“I see.”
Another smile, wry and ageist. It says I have a lot to learn, but with such warmth that I cannot be offended. I can, however, be made depressed. I take a sip of wine and think: Prattle. Prattle will get me out of this. I do not want to be having this conversation. I do not want to hear about compromise and settling and resignation. “Lovely services,” I say.
He looks at me with the wry smile.
“I should probably go mingle,” I say.
Smile bares teeth.
“Want to meet my sister?”
“I do, indeed.”
We find her in the pink room talking to Colleen Hathaway. Hannah tends to elevate her voice when excited, which is why I can hear her say, “No, it’s worse than that, this strain can live in air, you can get it just from walking to the store. No, you don’t have to be around someone who’s already sick. No, this kind of plague can’t be cured, it moves so fast by the time you realize you have it, you’re dead.”
Colleen slinks off to the self-serve bar.
“Hannah, meet Dan. Dan, Hannah. Dan is Agneth’s navy guy.”
Hannah says: “Whoa.” And then: “The navy navy guy? From Mexico?”
“A pleasure,” says Dan.
They are the same height.
“Whoa,” says Hannah. “I imagined you—”
“Taller, yes. We’ve covered that.”
I like the way he says we and am amazed, as I often am by language as power, at the way a simple pronoun can upend a relationship.
Hannah, on the other hand, does not like the results. If we’re a we, then she’s a she.
“What else did you cover?”
I say, “Oh, just the marrow of every artistic enterprise since the caveman.”
No response.
“That they didn’t get married because life got in the way. And that Aggie went to see him a couple weeks ago, first time in fifty years.
“Whoa.”
“Yeah.”
“Drink?”
“No, thanks. Bad liver.”
“Okay,” says Hannah. And: “Nice services.”
I shake my head and say: “Forget it, it doesn’t work.”
Our trio moves to a corner. Decor for the room includes three six-foot paintings of fat people on roller skates. Fat people with tapered limbs, limbs like twigs, which could never sustain all that fat in the real world.
Hannah’s looking at Dan, trying to make something of the alternate life Aggie could have had. Or maybe that’s just what I’m doing and Hannah is thinking Barbie. No, hantavirus. Nope, it’s Aggie. She says: “So do you regret what happened?”
Dan appears to have been waiting for this question. He’s certainly rehearsed his response.
“Regret’s complicated,” he says. “Especially as you get older. I have a lovely wife and three children. Grandchildren, too. When I see them, it validates my life. The life I built after your grandmother returned to the life she already had. I do not regret any of these things, I cherish them.”
Hannah is not satisfied. She looks stricken. And so do I. Moving on is a horrible process. Accepting your lot. We have now lost our father and our grandmother, but we will move on. All the truisms about loss will show themselves worthy: We won’t forget, but we will cope. We will ask loss to tell us what matters. We will say: I want knowledge only of God’s will for me and the strength to carry it out, what will be will be, I cannot rue a life so long as God has planned it for me. We will come to terms with the good and the bad, and find peace in the offing.
Hannah says, “But you loved her, right? Don’t you ever think about what could have been?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute.”
We follow him to the foyer, where he retrieves his coat from the spillover rack. In his plaid ivy cap he looks like a cabbie, circa 1974. Sanford and Son. He buttons up his coat to the neck and upturns the collar.
He extends his hand and the instant I touch it, I don’t want him to leave. Don’t leave!
“Your grandmother knew she was dying, you know. That’s why she came.”
Don’t leave!
He puts his other hand atop mine and looks at Hannah. “You’re probably too young,” he says, “but I’ll say it anyway. Regret is irrelevant.”
Hannah is near tears. “But then why did she go see you?”
The elevator opens. He’s got his hand on the button.
“To say goodbye.”
“Did she?”
Again with the smile and then: “Not really.”
Door closes. Hannah turns on me in a rage. “What the hell was that? What did he mean?”
She slumps to the floor, crying. Can’t even make it to her room. Some of the guests look away. No one thinks to get Mother, which is for the best.
I squat. Probably I should put my arms around her, but I know she’ll just slough me off. We are sitting in the doorway like ear
thquake survivors, foot to foot, sole to sole.
“I like those Converse,” I say.
Snuffles. “Thanks.”
“I’m sorry I brought him over. I wasn’t thinking.”
She wipes her nose on her sleeve. “It’s okay.”
“Want a tissue?”
I go to the guest bathroom, stocked with twenty rolls of toilet paper. Mother fears poverty, which, in her mind, is best represented by abrasive paper or no paper at all. One of the cabinets in the pantry is all Charmin.
By the time I get back, Hannah’s gone. Off to her room.
I could smack that guy Dan. You can never say goodbye to your best love, even if you’re dying—that’s the moral here?
I look about the room for Eric. The postmortem has thinned out. I spot him, Stanley, and Wanda, milling by the cheese.
Twenty-four
No one has to tell me, I know: my heart stopped. I was in the park, on a bench, feeding the pigeons. I do not know why people of advanced age—women in particular—like to feed pigeons. Or why most old ladies look the same. Our coats cinch above the waist with a fabric belt; our breasts are saddlebags. Many my age have not stood upright since 1990. You make peace with the decline of your body long before you’d like. In turn, you settle into pastimes of no appeal. So there I was, pinching dough from a street pretzel. The birds, as birds do, were in a scrum. They had little regard for me, which was fine. It meant I should be on my way. I uncrossed my ankles and made ready to stand. Who could have imagined what trials are standing, sitting, climbing, walking, come eighty-four? I once heard a writer say that though it’s hard to get characters to perform basic functions without feeling like a jackass, it must be done. As he put it, “Even Proust had to open the window.” So consider me, who actually can’t open a window unaided. I thought the limbo between incarnations was a time to reflect, but how can I think with this pain in my arm? My chest is so tight, it’s freeze-dried.
I was halfway off the bench when a young boy barreled through the flock. He wore ski pants that hampered the progress of his legs so that he’d barrel, fall, and barrel again. I lost momentum on the way up. I covered my face and head. Mayhem is the sound of wings flapping.
