by Hilary Zaid
Between us, their silence rose up until it stood, shoulder to shoulder, like a fourth person.
When I said, “I’ll meet you down there,” neither one of them looked up. They were still standing there, unmoving, when I crested the hill, probably there, still, as I wandered down the steep road toward the cemetery gates. I had my own deep grief to meet, the price of going forward, always, that backwards glance.
( )
Three days after Valentine’s Day in 1992 we buried Gramma Sophie. It was a little coastal cemetery west of Ojai, a bit of rolling green earth right at the edge of the ocean, flagged with spreading palms. “Unbelievable,” my father muttered. “Untouchable, prime real estate,” he breathed, when the ocean rose up into view, slate gray, brooding, as we drove through the rustic gate. He meant: doubly sacred. His eyes gleamed with regret.
The rabbi, someone Uncle Irvin had found in the phone book, wore a tweed coat with elbow patches. Three jump-suited men leaned on shovels behind the grave. The mortician’s apprentice, a gray man in a gray suit with a long face and fingernails thick with fungus, stood solemnly by the hearse.
The day of the funeral was overcast, those low coastal clouds that might burn off, might bring rain. My father pulled the car up too close behind the hearse, then backed it with a jerk. Rebecca, Ted, and I climbed over the front seats, out onto the grass where Uncle Irvin, Aunt Leah, and the tweed-coated rabbi stood beside the cemetery men. We had returned, all of us, to the origin of time: a hole in the green earth, my Gramma Sophie’s body.
My mother and Aunt Leah clung to each other, clutching rumpled tissues. Rebecca stood by Uncle Irvin, her eyes, like his, bloodshot but dry. The mortician waved us forward, and my father and Uncle Irvin, Rebecca, my mother and I hauled the plain pine box together from the back of the wagon; we struggled it over the curb, my mother and Aunt Leah barefoot, their shoes abandoned behind them, planted in the soft, clinging earth.
Our throats closed over our grief; open them, and what shrill, animal keening would have issued forth, what primitive howl of pain? All around us, the earth below and the sky above poured forth their funereal music.
The rabbi murmured ancient words, warm and smooth as stones—v’yitgadal, v’yitkadash—to the ragged ululation of a hidden bird shrouded in the overhanging oaks; the low cry of a train winding its way along the coast, wailing down the distance, faded and disappeared. We pressed on black ribbons and tore them. My father pushed his yarmulke to the center of his crown. Then the cranks wound down, their indecorous, mechanical clicks loud as they lowered my Gramma Sophie’s box into the ground.
And what did I remember about that day, now that the twin filters of time and grief had strained my memory clear of the debris of its details? The rough thunder of dirt bursting against the top of the rough pine box, subsiding to a thud, ascending to a soft, clay rain; explosion, thump and sigh. The length of the slowly filling coffin, pale as a blank sheet of paper. The whisper of my father’s rough fingers fumbling to caress the coffin, a child for the last time at his mother’s side. The liquid clench of my own jaws as, in the family way, I strangled back tears. The silence of the drizzle, then, as it started, blending the gray gauze of the sky down into the horizon, curtaining the landscape around us, a mist into which we disappeared, car doors closing, earth subsiding to rain, and rain to earth. I walked the path to the curb alone.
I thought I’d left my sorrow for my Gramma Sophie at Anya’s door. But I hadn’t. I walked alone now, away from Sol and Francine, away from Julia’s grave, tumbling down the winding lanes that flowed like tributaries, rivulets, rills, all joining together as they wound down the valleys of the dead. Grief and guilt wrestled for my heart. The moment I had realized that Gramma Sophie’s death had to happen for my life to move on was the moment I felt I had killed her myself.
But that wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. Love, too, has its tributaries and its deltas, its rivulets and its rills, its thin branches, threatened with desiccation, loaded with salt longing for fresh. Love—my feet thudded downward; my blood pounded in my ears—has its floodplain; Love has its spring, a starting point, the source from which all of its streams will flow, and a destination all its streams will join at points below, indistinguishable from one another.
I looked back again, and this time, instead of earth showering into an open hole, I saw water:
When we move, the water folds in slow-moving wrinkles against the tile. A rich, chemical fog rising off the pool mixes with the green perfume of cut grass and dissipates, evaporates. Floating, my head half-submerged, I try to lie perfectly still, while Gramma Sophie’s hand presses up against the small of my back. She balances my whole weightless weight on five fingertips, while, with the other hand, she absently picks leaves off the surface of the water. “Keep breathing,” she says. Above, the sky, a whole inverted bowl of water held back by a breath. When I close my eyes, I can’t feel my skin. The trees throw sudden, dappled patterns against the backs of my eyes, little spots of shaded cool freckling my chest. She says, “Now, float,” withdrawing her hand, and I do.
I reached the bottom of the hill. When I turned back, toward the eastern hills, a pair of Japanese maples stood at either side of the lane like flames of fire.
I wandered toward a marker with the photo of a boy at the top, set into the stone like a jewel: a teenage boy knee-deep in gray waves, his eyes gray as the sea. And I couldn’t help thinking, waiting for Francine and Sol: The real tragedy of the dead is that our lives go on without them.
Then I spotted the Volvo winding its solitary way, bone white, down the lane.
( )
“Will you feed the chicken before we leave?” Francine had collapsed on the futon. She was sorting through the mail.
I glanced skeptically out the window. Huddled against a low fern, the prehistoric creature stared back, its beady black eye coldly appraising. I stepped out with a fistful of Cheerios and the lunatic bird dove at my foot, driving hard into my sandals. “Shit!” I flung the Cheerios into the corner of the yard and dashed in.
Francine held up one of our response cards. (I’d invited Fiona to the wedding. And Duncan Black. But we hadn’t had a reply.) “Who’s Jill Oey?” Jill.
“A friend.” I pronounced the word in the clearest way I could, debating whether it was necessary to say any more than that. The phone rang. I darted off to answer it.
“I’m calling about the chicken?” A man’s voice, rich and delighted, poured into my grateful ears. He’d seen my posters. Found, live chicken.
“Yes!” I answered, eager. “Is it yours?”
The man hesitated. He sounded confused. “You mean there’s really a chicken?” The smile faded from his voice. “I thought it was performance art.”
( )
It was still light over the pointed spires of the City, a dark Oz in the Indian summer dusk, as we drove across the Bridge to Debbie’s. (A short trip, but the psychological distance, as Francine liked to say, is enormous.)
Debbie’s cat met us at the door. A small, dark chocolate Burmese, Godiva wound herself around our legs, then trotted after us as we followed Debbie into the apartment. We were all in the kitchen, dicing basil, when from Debbie’s bedroom came a sudden shower of little bells tinkling.
“God!” Debbie called, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel. “Here, God!”
“Do you have a belly dancer hiding in there?” Francine nodded toward the bedroom. After all, we hadn’t had a bachelorette party.
Debbie looked from Francine to me. “I have a chuppah in there.” She raised her eyebrows. “Would you like to see it?”
We followed Debbie down the little hall into her bedroom. There, spread out across the queen-size bed, lay what looked like a handmade quilt, bordered on all sides with a fringe of tiny silver bells. Large, colorful squares, each one different, lined the edges around a large, rectangular panel of thick, cream-colored silk, in the center of which had been sewn a huge pomegranate tree—our pomegranate tree—in rich crimson
velvet. Francine gasped.
We stepped closer to the bed. The side panels, one-foot by one-foot squares of fabric bordered in red velvet, were not simple multicolored panes. I reached out to touch the closest one with my finger. Against the red, corduroy suspension cables of the Golden Gate Bridge stood two corduroy dogs with shiny, black button noses. Below them, stitched in gold thread the color of warm sand, a line of sloping letters read Love, Rebecca & Ted. My sister!
Francine was studying a panel near the corner. Two slightly faded photos had been printed side by side onto the white cotton fabric: In the first, a fat-cheeked girl of three or four, her auburn curls pulled back, straddled the sand, hands on her hips.
Next to her, my six-year-old self in a straw cowboy hat sat high in the branches of my cousins’ old oak, bare feet dangling down. “I lost TV for a week for that,” I murmured, remembering my mother’s harsh cry.
“For climbing up so high? Or for going topless?” Francine smirked, sliding her fingers under the hem of my shirt.
In the margin, my cousin had written in purple Sharpie: “Free to be . . .” Love, Nathan & Amy
Francine turned to Debbie. “Where did they get my picture?”
“Your mother,” Debbie answered, not taking her eyes off the quilt. Francine reached out and stroked the picture with the tip of her index finger.
“Look!” I exclaimed, turning to an exquisitely quilted mandala, its concentric circles stitched from colorful, silky fabrics I guessed were Tibetan. In the center of the circle sat a perfect, red lotus. Of course, I realized, Jigme could sew.
Francine turned into Debbie’s arms. “This is amazing!” she gushed.
“It’s incredible,” I agreed. “Did you sew all the squares together yourself?”
Debbie frowned. “Are you joking?”
I remembered walking into Betty’s sewing room, how her hands flew to cover a pile of scraps in the basket, bits of red velvet peeking out.
“It’s the most incredible thing anyone has ever done for us,” Francine told her.
I admired our chuppah, a quilt of friendship, a quilt of the future. I noticed there wasn’t a square on the quilt from Fiona; I didn’t want to ask. Fiona was gone—at least for now; Fiona had disappeared, the way so many people disappear; one day, I hoped, she would come back. Until then, I was just going to have to get by without her.
Francine and I inspected the chuppah, pulling the far corner toward us to the shimmering of tiny bells. Wendy had quilted her square; on top of a simple checkerboard pattern, black thread spelled out the words, Ravish my heart, my sister, my bride. “When on earth did she do this?”
“Wendy’s was the first square in,” Debbie answered. It figured. “Do you want to try it out?” Godiva batted at the chuppah’s tinkling fringes as we lifted it with outstretched arms above our heads. It was heavier than I’d expected. There, in front of Debbie’s white bed, presided over by Debbie and her little cat God, Francine and I stood alone together under our chuppah, our arms raised to the sky. The underside had been lined with silk the color of twilight and scattered with stars.
I blinked rapidly at our Technicolor dream quilt, our amazing and inimitable, button-spangled, bell-decked, silk-and-velvet wedding canopy, and tried to take in the fact that, for weeks, every person we loved had secretly worked his or her feelings about me and Francine into a single square foot of fabric, and that Debbie herself, the friend who had brought us together, and Betty had joined all of these squares together into a canopy that would shelter us. I blinked again, so that I could really, fully see it. The wedding canopy is supposed to be the place where the past stretches out its arms and becomes the future. Our chuppah already was.
( )
Our list, ink-smeared, food-stained, road-rough, curled like an autumn leaf.
A bottle of kosher wine for the ceremony. Check.
Cloth napkin for the wine glass. Check.
Check for Rabbi Loh. Check.
And now it was time to call Anya, while I still had one trump card to play.
“Anya,” I asked her without alluding to our emotional parting; that wasn’t how we did things, either Anya or I; we gave each other privacy. Dignity. “Are you coming to the wedding?”
“Am I coming,” she tossed the question aside. “Is she coming?” She? Anat. Batsheva’s daughter.
“Anat’s coming,” I told Anya, fairly certain she would balk at meeting her, fairly certain she was dying to. “I’d really like you to be there.” And I meant it. Even though, if Wendy came, I’d find myself with more than a bit of explaining to do. In that way, at least, I felt determined, once and for all, to start naming things for what they were.
Anya sighed, a weary sigh meant to conceal that fact that she’d finally gotten me to admit I cared.
“The caterer,” I pleaded practicality, “needs to have the final count.”
Anya’s voice revealed her interest was piqued. “I didn’t know it was going to be a catered affair!”
( )
Dina, the cellist from our klezmer trio, called about the processional music. “Sorry. Everything’s been a little frantic.” I rattled off half of my to-dos. “And on top of it all”—I peered out the back windows, where the chicken, tired of Cheerios, threatened to mount a glass-pecking revolt—“we’ve got to unload this crazy chicken.”
Dina, a wide-hipped redhead with sad, shtetl-brown eyes and red kewpie-doll lips, who didn’t have much sympathy for the problems of the modern bride, sparked to life. “A chicken? Can you bring it up to the Julia Morgan tonight by seven?”
Hallelujah.
That night, an unfamiliar silence descended on our home. “Enjoy it,” Francine advised me, plopping down on the couch. “It won’t last.”
As if on cue, the phone rang. It was Fiona. I didn’t know what to say. “Don’t say anything,” she commanded me. “Look, I know you’re mad.” Fiona was married. She was in L.A. Duncan Black was in Ireland. It was complicated. “But you’re getting married. Can we put it aside?” Could I put it aside? I didn’t want my wedding to turn suddenly into the Fiona Show. And I only had a Fiona-like instant to decide.
“We all have little compartments . . .” Francine raised her eyebrows at me and shrugged.
Damn, she was good.
“Of course,” I told Fiona, even though it wasn’t something I felt entirely sure about at all.
( )
The next day, our friends and family began to arrive. Saturday, late morning, Francine and I strolled down Manzanita Court with the dogs to find Fiona making her own way toward morning buns and café lattes. The minute Fiona saw us, she threw her arms out and started to sing, loud, clear notes that sailed down College Avenue: “I’m going to the chapel . . .” She broke into her effervescent smile, “and I’m gonna get ma-aa-rried!”
Francine and I groaned. Fiona held out her arms, theatrical, open. “It’s very clear,” she sang, “our love is here to stay.” Fiona had always loved to sing. Maybe we had to sing in order not to talk, but who cared? Why had I doubted her ability to be happy for me? In the morning sun, Fiona’s face, lit with music, shone.
A couple pushing a stroller applauded. Fiona called after them, “They’re getting married tomorrow!” The couple took a double take, smiled—a noncommittal, Bay Area liberal smile—and moved on.
That afternoon, Trisha and June pulled up in their new silver Jaguar, Francine’s “best girls,” to whisk Francine away for her last spa day as a bachelorette. “Consider it my mikveh,” she suggested. I kissed her goodbye and then, sealed up in their silver pod like astronauts or time travelers, they sped away.
I was the one who had wanted a mikveh. “Collection,” the word means, literally, a collection of water. Immersing in ancient pools, rivers, streams, Jewish people have sought ritual purity in water ever since Adam and Eve, banished, sought renewal in the river that flowed out of Eden. Jewish brides and bridegrooms traditionally immerse before they marry to wash away the past, to come together cleansed
, new.
That wasn’t exactly the way it seemed to me. I thought of the traditional basin, filling drop by drop with 200 gallons of rain; those deep blue wells held for me, not the clear, rinsing blue of a Diebenkorn sky, but the slow, brimming drops of Time.
Coalescence. Accumulation. What do we rinse ourselves in, if not the quivering liquid of every drop that has fallen before?
( )
Debbie, Sam (just in from Toronto), and I met up in the parking lot at Strawberry Canyon. In the West pool, lap swimmers plashed up and down the marked lanes. Beyond it, hidden, the East pool sat dormant in the shade of the shedding redwoods, deep and blue. As Debbie positioned her materials—little bottles of oil, candles, white pages printed black—I considered my two dear friends: Sam, lounging in long surf-shorts at the edge of the water, Debbie, throwing her head back, white teeth flashing like a wave, and realized—I had already been blessed.
We were still in our bathing suits, filing out past the West pool, the chemical tang of chlorine mixing with the dusty smell of the hillside and the Indian summer afternoon, our damp heads nearly touching, when I glanced over my shoulder into the huge blue eyes of Charlie May, advancing toward us on the path. He was shirtless and bronze, his Greek stature, I thought, particularly suiting, now that he was filthy rich. Thinking of Francine, I reminded myself: I was rich, too. “Hey, Charlie!” I called. “Enjoy the water!”
“Ellen!” Charlie May exclaimed. His big round eyes opened bigger and rounder, blue on white. “How are you?” Sam and Debbie stopped, Debbie frankly appraising Charlie, and looked back at me with a questioning glance.
