Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  I call Ann a redhead, but she says she’s blond. Her face is red, white, and blue: lipstick, pale, freckled skin, and blue eyes. She has bouncy toes. She was born to box. You can see this even when she wears her emerald green, ankle-length, beltless tunic, which would be a burka were it not for the fact that it’s just about see-through. No naughty details to report, just the silhouette of a body given by God for the sake of combat. She is, in fact, a kung fu fighter, and also a surfer and a rock climber, but what she’d really like to be is a poet. She writes poems and then she hides them. Or she loses them, or gets the computer or the briefcase or the trunk they’re in stolen—whichever doesn’t matter, just so long as nobody reads them. Still, I have read a few. They’re good. What would happen if she published one?

  I think I understand her fear. I’m from a town not much bigger than Ann’s, and every writer who has grown up in a small place and then left it behind knows that the first published word is a declaration of independence, as irrevocable as it is thrilling. “Putting on airs” is an announcement of singular voice. Small places tell stories with “we,” the sound of a first-person plural that is royal only in the fealty it demands of all within its tiny fiefdom.

  Consider the version of her own childhood that Ann can hear for the cost of a Bud at any bar within an easy drive of her father’s hand-built castle, from men who worked for him or drank with him or lost women to him: “Beer was on tap in our fridge, pigs were roasted, firewood split, flannels worn,” she writes. “This is the myth, still believed and retold.” She hears it repeated like a prayer, on bar stools and by her father’s deathbed. “They”—the “we” of Ann’s origins—“come from miles around to bear gifts and to pay homage, to this wisest of all men, self-made, prosperous, most capable man.”

  But, she asks, “How much does he really know when you take him from His Kingdom?” That this will not happen does not prevent her from dreaming of her father dislocated, of her own dislocation transposed onto his “Marlboro-man,” cancer-ridden frame.

  Fat chance. Dislocation is a kind of doubling, the self where it is recalling the self where it used to be, neither self certain of where it currently belongs. Dislocation is a kind of splitting, a double-consciousness. One half smiles, curtsies, says “Thank you” to those who hurt it. The other half rages, says “Fuck you,” plots vengeance or escape or, most romantically, redemption: the New Testament ideal, all that is split—knowledge and wisdom, body and mind, humanity and the divine—made whole.

  But redemption is not a real option, and dislocation is a half-life. All of us who embrace it persuade ourselves that it is chosen, that it is a strategy. If we are in academe we call this idea a “site of resistance.” If we are in the workaday world we call this half-assed approach “getting by.”

  The term “half-life,” of course, refers most accurately not to a strategy or a plan. It is a simple, stark description of radioactive decay.

  “Beer was on tap in our fridge, pigs were roasted.” Now the old man is dying and all the lives Ann has constructed to leverage herself away from him—Ann in California, Ann in Berlin, Ann in Manhattan, Ann-as-surfer, Ann-as-poet, Ann-as-not-redneck-royalty—have collapsed back into the hollow from whence she came.

  The myth of the hollow has its dark side. True to fairy-tale tradition, it’s feminine: Ann’s mother was the “local town whore,” she writes, who bore her father two daughters and then left them. Good-bye. She was replaced by a wicked stepmother who dunked Ann’s head in a toilet, held it there, beat her bloody. Ann’s father didn’t notice. Wicked stepmom left, too, taking half of Ann’s father’s self-made fortune with her. Good-bye. There was one more attempt at a mother, another ex-Mennonite, but Ann’s father kept this woman at a distance—bought her a house of her own miles away—and Ann barely knows her. She came around to help him die, but then she saw his wasted body in the bed they had occasionally shared and she packed quickly. Good-bye.

  Such practice, Ann had.

  Her mother left her father, and her father left the Mennonite Church, and Ann left the hollow, but that does not give her the authority to break free from anything. Thinking of her father’s wavering on the question of suicide—not because of fear but because his respect for the God he does not believe in restrains him—she writes, “Ask God’s blessing or thumb your nose at him, he still cuts the thread around here.”

  There is a story there, or at least an Oprah discussion, but Ann won’t indulge in such tales more fully told than in her letters. “I hear crickets,” she writes, “an airplane, the wind in the acres of leaves, almost like the sound of rain, the brusque shift of this little shack on its supports.” She is in a tree house built by her father on a section of land overlooking the Susquehanna. It’s a complete outfit—bed, stove, TV, even, everything but a phone—and it’s there that Ann retreats to write her letters.

  She might miss his dying.

  “A turkey vulture just soared so nearby I could see his eye”—Ann would wince if she knew I was reproducing her unintentional rhyme—“and hear his feathers rustle like a taffeta skirt.”

  I’d like to hear that myself, and so here I am, telling her: Save that sound, Ann, consider it a gift of your father’s dying. He seems like the kind of man who might appreciate the thought that even in death he can be productive. Use all the parts, Ann. There will be nothing to spare. That’s the trouble with half-lives, biographies split between one story and another, identities bisected. It’s tempting to declare of yourself that you’re one thing or another—your father’s daughter or an independent woman, a redneck up a tree or a poet from Brooklyn, a dusty corner of someone else’s myth or free of the past, down on the ground or high in the branches—but you can’t. Despite the infinite decay suggested by the term “half-life,” there is never enough to go around.

  MY MOTHER WAS A hillbilly from Tennessee by way of Indiana, my father was and is a Jew from Schenectady. I’m not sure I’d have known I’d be forever split between gentile and Jew had they not divorced when I was two years old. Thereafter I was a Jew on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and every other weekend, and my mother’s the rest of the week. Jew days in my father’s apartment, across the river from my mother’s house in Scotia, meant SpaghettiOs, kosher salami on Triscuits, and, on holidays, chopped liver at my aunt Roslyn’s. It seems to me now that the rest of the time we went to the movies, although I can only remember two, Excalibur and Hair.

  My goyishe mother also took us to the movies. She found a job baking cookies and brownies for a concession stand at our town’s movie theater, rehabilitated by a band of hippies who didn’t want to peddle corporate candy. My fourth summer, while my mother baked, I played in the theater. On the sunniest of days I sat in the dark eating warm cookies and watching reverently as the hippies threaded the two movies they owned through the projector, over and over: Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Harold and Maude. This constitutes my early Jewish education.

  I was a pale child. Nobody cut my hair, so I went off to kindergarten like a little chubby Ramone, hidden behind a thick brown curtain that hung down to my eyes in front and my shoulders in back. The other kids asked me if I was a boy or a girl. I refused to answer. Around December I tried to explain my complicated-yet-clearly-superior holiday situation. While the other kids would receive presents only on Christmas, I’d be getting gifts for nine days (Hanukkah plus December 25), although, given the Tuesday/Thursday schedule, several of those days would have to be crammed into a few evenings, between SpaghettiOs and R-rated movies.

  This was a lot for my classmates to absorb. My hair was unkempt and my clothes were dirty (I insisted on sleeping in them) and my mother sometimes dropped me off at school in a belching rusty blue Plymouth that looked like a rotten blueberry. So obviously I was poor, maybe even poorer they were. But nine days of presents? Was I a liar? Were my parents thieves?

  My parents provided another conceptual dilemma. There were a few kids
whose fathers had simply left, but at the time not a single one of my twenty-five classmates had parents who split them, mothers on Monday with whom they watched Little House on the Prairie and fathers on Tuesday with whom they watched The Paper Chase.

  Plus, I was “Jewish.”

  Or so I claimed. For the fall of my first year of schooling this ancestry provided me with minor celebrity, until it came time for Christmas vacation. On one of the last days of school that December, Mrs. Augusta asked a student to volunteer to explain Christmas. A girl named Heather shot her hand up and told us about the baby Jesus and Santa Claus while the rest of us stewed, since this was an answer we all knew, and we wanted Mrs. Augusta to love us. When she asked if anyone could explain the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, I raised my hand and she smiled, since the question, of course, had been meant for me alone. I stood. “On Hanukkah,” I declared, “I get extra presents.”

  Mrs. Augusta kept smiling. “Why?” she asked.

  “I’m Jewish.”

  “Yes,” she said, “and what does that mean?”

  “What does what mean?”

  “Judaism.”

  I had never heard of “Judaism.”

  My classmates, until that day free of that ancient sentiment that, I’d later learn, had prompted whispers and unhappiness when my Jew-father had moved onto Washington Road, began to giggle.

  Mrs. Augusta tried to help. “What else do you do on Hanukkah?” she asked.

  I beamed. I knew this one: “I eat gelt and chopped liver!”

  Giggles grew into guffaws, as kids parrotted me, special emphasis on gelt. It was a stupid word they had never heard before. “Gelt.” “Gult.” “Ga!”

  Oh, Mrs. Augusta! She tried.

  “Now, now. Doesn’t anyone have a question for Jeffrey?” Silence. “About being Jewish?”

  Bob Hunt raised his hand. This would not be good. The rumor was that he had actually flunked kindergarten, so this was his second time through, and he was older, dangerous. For Halloween he’d been Gene Simmons, of KISS. If only I had known then what I know now about the American-Jewish tradition of “Who’s a Jew?,” a campy little game that is, in truth, a self-defense training maneuver intended to prepare you for encounters with goyish hostiles such as Bob Hunt. Who’s a Jew? Gene Simmons, for one. Han Solo, Fonzie, yer mother.

  Bob’s question: “Yo. Sharlet. What’s gelt?”

  “Gold coins?” I tried.

  “Jewish people eat gold?” (And thus the endless cycle of anti-Semitism keeps on turning.)

  “I mean, chocolate?”

  Mrs. Augusta frowned. She had expected Maccabees and dreidels. Instead she was getting gelt, which she had never heard of. I was making a mockery of “Judaism.” “Which is it?” she asked. “Chocolate or gold? It has to be one or the other, Jeffrey. It can’t be both, can it?”

  How to say that it can?

  Like this: “It . . . it comes in a golden net,” I said.

  “I think he means candy,” Mrs. Augusta fake-whispered to the class, winning their laughter.

  I sat down. Mrs. Augusta decided to smooth things over with a song, “Jingle Bells.”

  Bob Hunt leaned toward me, fake-whispering just like our teacher: “Candy-ass.”

  I didn’t know what this meant, but it was clearly two things at once, and not good at all. Thereafter I resolved to be halfsies. I could not be fully both Jeffrey and Jew, chocolate and gold. If anyone asked, I decided, I was half-Jewish, on my father’s side, and he didn’t live with us anymore.

  ANN’S FATHER DIED a few weeks before Christmas. We drove down to Lancaster County for the memorial, a double pig roast in a hunting club perched above the hollow, a ragged American flag limp above the mud and bullet-riddled refrigerators and dead cars sleeping in the fields. Ann wore black pants and a black shirt and as a belt one of the ties her father rarely ever tied. There were men in camouflage and women in tight things and one old graybeard in a dirty red Santa suit he wears all year round, an excuse to pinch the cheeks—lower—of girls who’ve been naughty. That included Ann and the ex-Mennonite, Katy, who was for all purposes the grieving widow. They didn’t mind, not really. It was a day for drinking—beer at the memorial, and more beer, plus whiskey, at the house afterward. The house Ann’s dad built is made of flat stones—carried one by one up from the stream by little-kid Ann and her sister—mortared into a hall big as Valhalla, capped with the great wooden beams of a barn he scavenged, adorned with the skins of deer he killed. Their hooves are now coat racks and door handles. He was a man who used all the parts.

  We gathered around a giant wood stove in the basement, shoveling in logs and gulping down beer and caw-cawing like crows about Ann’s dad’s adventures. It wasn’t one of those crazy-funny-grief kind of evenings, just a good and drunken one. We had several aluminum vats of pork and roasted potatoes, and somewhere in the evening a proposal was floated—perhaps by the man who’d inherited the title of “Mayor of the Hollow” from Ann’s father, or maybe from the man whose daughter had moved to the big city to become a roller-derby champion—for a roast-potato battle, shirts and skins. Ladies topless, of course. A few potatoes splatted, but the blouses stayed on. The men made the snow yellow. Citified, I went looking for a bathroom. Along the way I found Ann’s dad’s bedroom, now Ann’s; on the nightstand there was a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, an eight-hundred-page novel about a disastrous father and his broken children. “The Brothers Karamazov?” I said to Ann when I returned. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

  “Beats Lear,” she said. She’d read that while she sat next to him, “140 pounds of man,” she’d written, “about to be dust.”

  “Cordelia’s my sister’s middle name,” I said. Lear’s good daughter.

  “Insurance,” Ann nodded. She understood why a parent might try to name a child into loving devotion. “My father could have used some.” She thought she’d failed him. After a vigil four months long, Ann’s father croaked his last in the five minutes she stepped out of his bedroom to get a soda. The old man didn’t even thank her. Never told her he loved her. Good-bye.

  I READ KARAMAZOV AFTER my mom died, too, only I was sixteen, and I was so damn dumb I thought it was a Jewish novel. My father took my sister and me on a grief trip, a long, gray boat ride to Nova Scotia, which to us was nowhere, which was why we went there. I sat on the deck of the boat spotting cold gray North Atlantic dolphins and trying to read the book, which is really fucking long, fingering the pages I’d put behind me on the assumption that consumption counted as comprehension and that comprehension led to transformation. I thought Dostoyevsky, a Russian, must be like Torah, filled with secrets about what’s right and what’s wrong and how to be a whole person. A total Jew.

  With my mother gone, what were the options? I took a look at my father, with whom I now lived, with whom I now ate not SpaghettiOs every night but whatever I felt like ordering at the Brandywine Diner, or the Olympic, or Son of the Olympic, and I thought: Here is a man, and now I’m one, too. A big grown-up Jew. Eating at diners was my rite of passage, my bar mitzvah.

  I don’t count Dostoyevsky because I figured out halfway to Nova Scotia that a Russian surname does not a Jew make, no sir, not by a long shot. Raised by goyishe wolves and a hippie Christian mom, even I could tell, eventually, that all this crap about the smell or lack thereof attending to the body of a dead monk did not make for a Jewish novel. I was confused. I’d seen Fiddler, the movie, danced to it in my socks, knew the words to “If I Were a Rich Man,” understood the movie’s essential lesson: There are two kinds of people in Russia, Cossacks and Jews. Translated to America, there was Bob Hunt and there was me. So who was this weird Alyosha Karamazov, this stupid saint who didn’t seem to understand that sometimes death really is the end?

  “What gives?” I asked my father, but he wasn’t talking at the time, and he didn’t answer. �
��What gives?” I asked my sister, but she was stuck on the idea that Madame Bovary was the solution to a dead mother, to being split in half. If only my father had possessed the good sense to book Bob Hunt a passage to Nova Scotia with us, I could have asked him. “Bob, what gives? This story, what good is it going to do me now? My mom’s dead and my dad’s a Jew and I’ve got to pick a side and I thought this would do the job, but it won’t. It’s not even Jewish to begin with.”

  “I know it’s not,” singsongs the Bob of my imagination. “You are.”

  What a liar.

  “Fuck Hunt,” as the half-Jew and his band of weak and/or incomplete comrades said when we were thirteen.

  “Douche” was another insult we liked. Also, “Pussy.” These were not bold vulgarities but whispered truths. My Masada-dad had told me to fight if anybody crossed me, but what did he know? It was him who’d crossed me. I was a pale, chubby half-Jew kid from half a family, son of the “kike-dyke” of Washington Road, as Bob Hunt christened my mother with double inaccuracy. But he had caught the essence of the thing: Even dumb punk kids understand that it’s all about where you came from.

  EUROPE’S MOST ORGANIZED people, the Germans, grasped this, and so do the Jews. For that matter, the Jews beat the Germans to the concept by half a millennium. Yes, only half; the matrilineal rule really came into its own during the Middle Ages, when Christians raping Jews was such a common occurrence that Jews started counting bloodlines through mothers instead of fathers, lest they be cursed by generations of halfsies unto erasure.

  Once I went up to a table of young Lubavitchers on the hunt for strayed Jews and told them I was interested. Not that I was really a Jew, I said, not that I went to temple, you understand, not that I really knew anything about it—

  “You’re a Jew,” said the middle one, a tall redhead with a face full of pimples crammed between his beard and his black hat.