Navel Gazing

by Michael Ian Black

  The lawyer turns to me, eyebrows raised as if to ask, “When did you first decide to murder your wife?”

  As delicately as I can, I ask Martha what the fuck she is talking about.

  “I just don’t trust you,” she says. This is some heavy shit. How can she not trust me to do what’s best for her? Haven’t I done an excellent job providing for her over these last however many years? Haven’t I done everything in my power to keep her safe and secure and, yes, alive? How many times have I accompanied her to various medical appointments? When she sliced the tip of her finger off with the kitchen knife, didn’t I watch—WITH SYMPATHY—as she placed that fingertip in a sandwich baggie, and didn’t I then drive her to the emergency room? Haven’t I tended to her illnesses, been present for her in delivery rooms, laughed at her while she threw up after drinking too much? Never once have I slipped any medical personnel a twenty and said, “As long as we’re here, why don’t you end her?” I have never, ever done that, yet here I stand, accused of murder.

  Probing further, I discover that Martha fears, in the event of her medical incapacitation, that I am likely to do whatever is most expedient. I assure her that I will follow her instructions to the letter. If she should fall into a coma and wants to be kept on ventilators and feeding tubes and have twice-weekly shiatsu sessions until eternity, I will make that happen. Does she want her head cut off and cryogenically frozen? I will do that.

  “I don’t want my head cut off.”

  Then I won’t do that. Whatever she asks of me, I will do; that is the purpose of a living will. Meanwhile, the billable minutes are ticking away and the lawyer is watching all of this with detached amusement on his face, perhaps wondering which of us he will represent in the divorce.

  Eventually, and after much cajoling, she does agree to let me serve as her medical proxy but only because she cannot think of anybody better, and only after wringing multiple promises from me that I will not kill her. I promise and promise and promise, but who are we kidding? I probably will.

  The rest of the document is pretty straightforward: I get her stuff, she gets my stuff, the kids get our stuff. Fortunately, I have not found the level of professional success that would prompt a big fight over my estate, so the kids will most likely inherit not much more than some decent furniture and a sizable collection of cassettes.

  Once we finally sign and notarize our wills, Martha asks how I feel. I tell her I found the experience of talking through the details of our deaths to be mildly discomfiting, especially in front of a lawyer who admitted, when I asked, that the bookshelf behind him filled with legal tomes was “mostly for show.”

  (Apparently, everything is online now, so he doesn’t need books, but he feels that clients like to see the law library so he keeps it around.)

  “But aren’t you glad we finally did it?”

  “Not really,” I answer. Completing my will felt tantamount to signing my own death sentence. Yes, I know I’m going to die one day, but I didn’t like making it official. If something isn’t official, maybe it won’t happen. I’d had the same reaction when I took out a life insurance policy a few years before.

  Getting life insurance is less ghoulish than writing a will, because it’s simply a hedge in the unlikely event of my death. That’s the key word: unlikely. After all, the life insurance company is betting that I’m not going to die. People not dying is how they make their money. If everybody who took out life insurance expired before their policies did, they’d be out of business. The fact that insurance companies are profitable corporate entities who are rich enough to buy blimps to fly over sporting events leads me to believe that they believe I will not die. Viewed in this way, buying a life insurance policy is actually a great way to guarantee I’ll live, because I have never outwitted a corporation and doubt I ever will.

  Determining the correct amount of life insurance to purchase was the tricky part. I knew firsthand the value of the stuff, since it was life insurance that kept my siblings and me afloat in the years after Dad died. He’d had the foresight to take out a robust policy that kept us fed, clothed, and educated until we reached adulthood. So I knew I needed to insure myself for a sizable enough amount that my family would be taken care of in the event of my early demise, but I didn’t want to take out a large enough policy to give anybody a motive. In the end, I insured myself for enough that, should I die, Martha and the kids will have enough money to hold on to the house and feed themselves, but not enough money to keep the lights on. That way, it’s in both of our interests that I stay alive, because I like to live and she likes electricity.

  An interesting side note: Until recently, I believed that a life insurance policy wouldn’t pay off if you commit suicide, but a friend of mine said he’d done some research into the matter during a prolonged stretch of financial misfortune in his own life and discovered that they actually will pay off if you’ve had the policy for over two years. Great news if I decide to kill myself, as I have already said I might. Not likely, but possible. As for my friend, he jumped off a bridge.

  “I would never kill myself,” Martha says. Good. That’s good. While I reserve the right to take my own life one day, she is not allowed. Nobody I love is ever allowed to kill themselves. That probably seems hypocritical, but as I have often said, I am fine with hypocrisy so long as the hypocrite is me.

  A weird game to play is to mentally assemble any group of people and try to guess which of them will die first. In my group, the group of Martha and the kids and me, it will be me. That’s okay. One of the surprising things I’ve learned since starting a family is that I am capable of valuing other people’s lives more than my own.

  The kids will live a long time. Martha is going to live a long time, too. That’s not speculation on my part. It’s fact. As part of obtaining life insurance, Martha and I both had to get physicals and submit to blood tests. Mine came back normal. When hers came back, our insurer told her she had the cholesterol and heart rate of an elite athlete. “You can eat bacon and eggs every day for the rest of your life and not have to worry,” he told her. Plus, she’s got a gaggle of crusty old ladies in her gene pool, so she should be fine.

  See the merry widow playing tennis with her new friend the handsome schoolmaster. The merry widow building housing for orphans in Guatemala. The merry widow sampling local wiener schnitzel at a café on the Danube. The merry widow, old and happy, wrapped in a shawl, sitting at the kitchen table in winter, thinking of her late husband who died much too young and much too handsome but who had the foresight to draft a will and get life insurance. “Good man,” thinks the merry widow. “Good man.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “She’s a nice lady”

  Mom’s on oxygen now. Whatever metric they use to check her oxygen levels isn’t supposed to fall below 70 percent. Well, Mom’s levels now fall below that, so they’ve given her supplemental oxygen she wheels around in a little tank. Combine that with her three-wheeled motorized scooter, and Mom now needs five wheels to move through her day. If she gets any more, she’ll require a trucker’s license to leave the house.

  She doesn’t have to use the oxygen all the time yet, but she needs it more than they initially thought she would. Her spirits remain good, but I know that each new indignity—the scooter, the oxygen, the colostomy bag—feels like another step closer to the end. Before, when she told me she felt like she’d wasted her life, I didn’t ask the obvious question. So I ask now.

  “What did you want to do?”

  “I really wanted to go to law school. I had very good grades, but my guidance counselor talked me out of it because he said girls can’t be lawyers. He said, ‘You can be a teacher or a secretary or something.’ And I was too young and stupid to buck the system.”

  Mom made up for her lack of system bucking in later years, first by coming out as a lesbian when doing so meant to risk being ostracized or worse. She sued the state of Illinois to provide better services for Susan and children like Susan, a case she won.
Later, she sued the state of New Jersey to force them to offer better educational opportunities for Susan and children like Susan. She won that case, too. With Elaine, she fought for the Equal Rights Amendment. She ran for the local school board but lost. Growing up, it seemed to me that we were forever bucking the system, and all that effort—the effort of trying to live as a blended gay family under dubious financial and psychological circumstances—exacted a severe toll on everybody. Bucking the system seemed to cost us all a great deal.

  Her other regret, she says, is the way she raised us. “I’m not happy with the parenting job I did. At all.”

  I know what she means, but I don’t make her say it. Nor do I contradict her. The fact is, she’s right. Or, in my view, half right. As a parent now myself, I feel I have two responsibilities. The first is to make sure my kids know they are loved, and I can find no fault with Mom in that regard. As I said earlier, she always let us know she loved us. The second is to make kids feel safe. And in that, she failed.

  Our household felt stuffed with danger, the way an olive is stuffed with a pimiento, bright and red and in the center of everything. Nobody could ever relax there, because any little thing could set off either Elaine or Mom. Maybe one of us had failed to “properly” vacuum the dog hair from the stairs or left the toilet seat up or not come running at the sound of our name being called. Maybe somebody had left dirty dishes in the sink or eaten the Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies without permission. Maybe nobody had done anything.

  Once I received detention in school for something and had to have Mom sign a pink form acknowledging that she knew I’d been punished. Rather than face her wrath, I forged her name on the form and stuffed it into a clear plastic pencil pouch in my three-ring binder. Mom found the slip. After the screaming subsided (“Liar!” “Sneak!” “Bastard!”), she tacked a long list of chores to the kitchen bulletin board for me to complete as punishment. At the bottom of that list, I wrote “Heil Hitler,” not a smart move in a Jewish household. More rage and punishment followed—in fairness, that one’s on me.

  But she was right, in a way. I did lie. I did sneak around. Not because I had anything in particular to hide, but because I always felt so on edge, so terrified that I would be called to task for one offense or another. Elaine’s son bore the worst of it. Elaine routinely terrified him, beating him with her words, calling him worthless, fat, stupid. If Mom tried to step in, Elaine turned her fury on her, screaming at Mom to stay the hell out of her business and away from her son. Eventually, Mom stopped defending him. Nobody defended him. He moved away after high school and even though I grew up with him, I haven’t seen him since.

  Living like that, day after day, wears on you. The constant stress fills the house with a kind of smog. The air itself feels toxic. Sometimes you carry it with you, as I did, for years. Sometimes you never leave it behind.

  I ask Mom about her own mother, Grandma CeCe, short for Cecile. “Oh, she was horrible,” says Mom. “Horrible.”

  In her adult life, Mom created an environment that almost perfectly matched the one in which she grew up. Like her mother, Mom had three kids, the youngest with serious medical problems. My mother’s brother, my uncle, was born with a serious kidney ailment that required frequent hospitalization and a tremendous amount of money, money my grandfather struggled to earn. Grandpa traveled a lot for work, leaving Grandma home to raise three kids and take care of her own mother, who lived with them. Grandma did not possess the coping mechanisms to deal. Mom says, “I think she was so tired that anything that happened, she would take a negative attitude toward, and yell and scream and hit.”

  “I didn’t realize she was a hitter,” I say.

  “Oh, she was lovely,” Mom replies.

  The turmoil in their childhood household strikes me as being a lot like the turmoil I experienced. I ask her about the parallels between the two households. Was our house like the house in which she grew up?

  “It was. Yes, it was. I knew it and I didn’t know how to correct it. I was afraid of Elaine like I was afraid of my mother. It was bad. It was just bad.”

  “Did Elaine ever hit you?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  I never knew that.

  We sit in silence for a moment or two before she speaks again. “Now that you’ve gotten me nauseous and I could throw up, do you have any nicer questions?”

  Not really, no.

  We hang up and I start thinking about my own relationship with Grandma. I’d never been very close with her. She lived too far away, in Chicago, and the couple of times a year we saw her, she yelled a lot. At store clerks and waiters and people on the sidewalk and people who displeased her, which seemed to be everybody. The whole world had in for Grandma, and she let the whole world know she wasn’t going to take it. Mom thinks CeCe was a much better grandparent than parent, but I didn’t see much evidence of that.

  After Dad died, Mom sent Eric and me to Chicago to stay with Grandma CeCe for a couple weeks. I’m not sure what Mom thought that would accomplish, other than to get us out of our surroundings for a little while to clear our heads. Grandma’s apartment was small and deadly boring in the way that all adult homes seem to kids. There was literally nothing for us to do, other than sit in her cramped living room and watch All My Children with her every afternoon, a program Grandma attended to with religious fervor. To those who belittle soap operas, I say this: Watch one every day for two weeks and see if you, too, don’t find it the most compelling form of entertainment yet created.

  One day, Grandma offered to take us to a movie of our choice. Eric and I selected Purple Rain, which had just come out. I don’t know why we picked it, other than the fact that Prince rode a purple motorcycle on the poster. For those unfamiliar, Purple Rain is Prince’s cinematic autobiography, heavy on funky rock music and just as heavy on sex. Dirty sex. I have never felt more uncomfortable than while watching that four-and-a-half-foot-tall purple-garbed sex god get freaky in front of my grandmother, a woman who bore three children but who, I am confident, never had intercourse. Nobody had much to say about the movie afterward, because it’s hard to have a conversation with your grandmother about Apollonia’s perfect, cinnamon-colored nipples.

  Sometime near the end of our stay, Eric and I were parked in our preferred position in front of the television when Grandma came out of her room, a basket of laundry on her hip, and unloaded on us:

  “Why am I doing everything around here? You two don’t do anything except sit there. You’re spoiled and ungrateful!”

  I remember my shock at her outburst. What did she mean spoiled and ungrateful? Didn’t she know my father had just died and I was excused from all chores for the rest of my life? That’s the way the death of a parent works: A parent dies and the child is allowed to do whatever he or she wants, forever. Not that I felt I was putting one over on Grandma—I mean, what was I supposed to be doing that I wasn’t doing? The laundry? I didn’t know how to do laundry. Moms do laundry, and if not moms, grandmoms. That’s just the way it is. How did she not know this?

  Grandma stormed out of the apartment, leaving me and Eric to regard each other in shocked silence. We hadn’t thought we were being assholes, but Grandma put us straight. Assholes we were, spoiled and ungrateful. At the moment, I don’t think either of us felt we had much to be grateful for, but that was probably just further evidence of our ingratitude. If Mom’s plan in sending us to Chicago was to make us feel better, it didn’t work.

  Grandma’s infrequent visits to New Jersey provoked in me a small dread. It wasn’t that I didn’t like being around her exactly, but I didn’t know what it was I was supposed to do with a grandmother. What good was she? She didn’t play, wasn’t funny, didn’t spoil us. It wasn’t even clear that she liked us very much. If anything, interactions with Grandma felt forced, with me trying to occupy our empty conversational space with the same filler I used in the obligatory thank-you cards Mom made me write for the five-dollar bills she sent on our birthdays.


  “Dear Grandma, Thank you for the five-dollar bill you sent for my birthday.” Then I would stare at my stationery for long minutes, pencil gripped in hand, trying to conjure up something more to write. Maybe something about my daily triumphs and struggles: “School is good.” Perfect. What next? Something relatable, maybe, perhaps about the weather? “The weather is hot.” Yeah, good: pithy and descriptive. More, more. Any recent activities? “I went to a Yankees game last week with my friend.” Great, now to bring this missive to a close with a white lie and a fake sign of affection. “I hope I get to see you soon. Love, Michael.”

  I was living in New York when I got the call that Grandma had died. Just after her eightieth birthday. A couple of years before, with her health in decline, she had moved to Florida to be near Mom. After a lifetime of snowy Chicago winters, I don’t think Grandma ever felt at home among the palm trees and strip malls. She didn’t belong there. Didn’t make friends at her apartment complex. I don’t know where she belonged. The conversation with Mom was short and to the point. “Grandma died,” she said. No, she didn’t want me to come down there. “There won’t be a funeral,” she said.

  Martha only met her once, in Florida. The three of us had ice cream together, three small cups of vanilla soft-serve. This was toward the end of her life, when her walk had slowed and she had mellowed. She took my arm from the car to the ice cream place. I don’t think she feared falling; I think she just liked holding my arm. I remember sitting at an outdoor patio table filling the conversation with the same fluff I always had, wishing I felt closer to her but not knowing how. I remember a moment when I caught Grandma’s eye scrutinizing me; it was just a moment, but I think I saw her feeling happy for me. And I think feeling happy for me made her happy, too. Grandma was kind to Martha, asking her about her childhood in Minnesota, her parents, her brother and sister. We ate our ice cream and Grandma held my arm again as we walked back to the car and up to her apartment, still deadly boring. Afterward, when Martha and I were alone and quiet together, Martha said, “She’s a nice lady.”