The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  “Thank—”

  “Don’t let it get away from you.”

  “Okay, come on now.” Somehow Lance had materialized on the passenger side of the car; he stood holding the door open. John swung a leg around, worked to free the other from the little space. He began to raise himself, lost his balance. Lance extended an arm and helped hoist him upright.

  “Antonio,” John remembered.

  “That’s right.”

  “Antonio.” Very fondly.

  “Let’s go.”

  With care and a sense of virtue John shut the door behind him, then teetered and buckled against it as if buffeted by the wind, thrown off his very course.

  6.

  Feet up on the chair, knees drawn in, her eyes five inches from the book in her lap, wisps of hair come loose from her barrettes to form a fuzzy nimbus around her face, Biscuit read:

  Following the church ceremonies, the priests and a large number of people gathered at ancestral cemeteries and placed pancakes, pretzels, loaves of bread, and one or two decorated eggs on the graves. Sometimes they added a cup of meal or a bit of sweetened cereal. After the ceremony priests later gathered the remaining food and took it home. Finally, the priests said the office of the dead.

  The office of the dead?

  She pictured a large metal desk flanked by filing cabinets, a window behind with blinds drawn, blocking out all but a hint of flashing neon sign. A cloaked, hooded figure enthroned on a swivel chair, feet up on the desk, cigar burning in the ashtray, scythe leaning against the wall, old-fashioned rotary phone getting ready to jingle.

  She herself was occupying an office at the moment: that of the children’s librarian, Mrs. Mukhopadhyay. Just beyond the door, which was not shut, Mrs. Mukhopadhyay chatted with young patrons and their caregivers at the circulation desk. It was a rainy Saturday; prime time in the children’s room. “How are you feeling?” one mother after another kept asking in knowing, confidential tones while Mrs. Mukhopadhyay scanned the bar codes on their books.They all said virtually the same things, as if reading from a script: a string of hopefuls auditioning for a bit part—“Are you tired? You look great.”

  Biscuit paid scant attention to the content of Mrs. Mukhopadhyay’s replies, listening mostly to the rise and fall of her voice. She believed Mrs. Mukhopadhyay possessed the prettiest voice in the world. Sometimes at home, alone in her room, Biscuit would stand before her full-length mirror and chat sotto voce with her reflection in her best approximation of the librarian’s Bengali lilt. It was a water voice, trickling and eddying and cool.

  Tucked into the librarian’s chair, half listening to her converse just outside the office; listening, too, to the Brahms chamber works wending softly from the librarian’s portable CD player, Biscuit breathed contentedly over the fat book on her lap. It was from upstairs, the adult stacks. It had truly hundreds of pages. Nearly a thousand. Wafery, yellowed, vanilla-smelling pages that fell with a dense plunk, like a plank, when you flipped over a great sheaf at once.

  Biscuit flipped just so now, idly, backward, traveling, much as a finger travels on a spun globe, from the Southeast Russian province of Saratov to land, by chance, among the Parsis, the Zoroastrians of Bombay:

  Vultures look hungrily on while the funeral-servants remove the body from the bier, lay it on the stone bed, and strip it of the white garments. After these are thrown into the well, the bier is borne from the Tower of Silence, and the vultures begin their meal. In the course of a few hours the bones are usually stripped bare.

  Traveling forward again, to the Tanala of Madagascar, where her finger came down on this passage:

  To discover a body of a drowned person, a banana tree core encircled with a silver bracelet is cast on the water, in the belief that it will rest motionless over the spot where the drowned one lies. After this, if divers fail to bring up the body, the Ikongo conduct funeral services over the deceased’s mat and pillow.

  The customs, in their peculiarity and their specificity, had the quality of belonging to a fairy tale. Biscuit considered that they were only slightly more real than fairy tales. Even at age nine, she knew not to believe everything she read, not even in a library book from the adult nonfiction section. She was no budding historian (already in school she showed signs of being a poor history student, with remarkably little regard for the significance of dates), but even if the book were not so gorgeously redolent of age, even if its leaves and binding did not give off such an unambiguous waft of antiquity, she did know how to find a copyright, and this one told her that the book had been written long before she was born, before her parents had been born, too, and in her view this was enough to render it manifestly Old, belonging to that one vast, misty category that included everything from horse-drawn carriages and hoop skirts to typewriters and black-and-white TVs.

  Sometimes, Biscuit knew, what had been perfectly correct in Olden times was not so anymore. In other musty books she’d found references to things that no longer applied: gramophones, polio, Negroes, beef tea, the admonition that ladies ought not swim. It wasn’t only books. Her own grandma was always saying things Biscuit knew to be wrong. She claimed that drinking cold milk with hot soup would give a person a bellyache; that “Orientals” had an inborn talent for math; that the television remote could under no circumstances be programmed to work for the DVD player (Paul had rather rudely but effectively proven her wrong on this last). All these errors made Biscuit feel rather sorry for her grandma; but more, they told a cautionary tale.

  And so she brought to this aged book of funeral customs a mixture of skepticism and indulgence, yet this made what she read no less satisfying or useful to her.

  Leafing again:

  The world outside first learns of a death when the family hangs blue and white or blue and yellow lanterns at the front door and pastes white paper over the red good-luck strips. In addition to this ceremony, it is customary in Peiping to station a drummer outside the front door, to the left of the entrance if a man has died, and to the right, if a woman.

  Gold leaf and pearls are placed in the mouth of the dead in some parts of China, and a ball of red paper mixed with incense ash is tucked between the lips.

  Mrs. Mukhopadhyay had helped Biscuit find the book. Never mind that it lay within the library’s upper provinces, two stories above the cozy, underground children’s enclave; Mrs. Mukhopadhyay’s range knew no bounds. She had jotted the call number, 393–Death customs, on the back of an old card-catalog card, her bangles jangling cool music as she did, and then she’d explained exactly where that number would turn out to be in the stacks. “Alllll the way up, against the far wall,” she’d said, tracing the route on a map in the air with a flourish that produced more silver-sliding notes.

  Now Mrs. Mukhopadhyay came into her office carrying two damaged books: a Nancy Drew clinging to its binding by frail threads, and a picture book that looked as though a bite had been taken out of its cover. These she deposited into the plastic bin that she referred to as “the clinic”; bit by bit, as time allowed, she would triage its contents, mending the mendable and removing from circulation those volumes deemed past repair. For now, she went behind the desk and squatted to remove her boysenberry yogurt from the mini-fridge.

  “Should I get up?” asked Biscuit.

  “No, I want to sit here.” Mrs. Mukhopadhyay settled into the rocking chair in the corner, beneath the square window that gave a view of the roots of bushes, the undersides of leaves, and snippets of patrons’ feet and legs. Once, gazing out this window during a downpour, Biscuit had spotted a clear-winged bug perched upside down on a rhododendron leaf: using it, in effect, as an umbrella. The cleverness of the infinitesimal! Now she watched as Mrs. Mukhopadhyay put her feet up on a low stool, leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Her belly was getting very big now, not unlike how Biscuit’s mother had looked just a few weeks earlier.

  “So,” she asked, opening her eyes and unlidding her yogurt container, “how is your research going?” She said
this without any amusement in her voice, without the speckling hint of laughter most adults would have sowed among the words.

  “It’s good.”

  “You are finding interesting things?”

  Biscuit nodded.

  “Read me something. For example.”

  Biscuit flipped a plank of pages: plunk. Landed in Bali. Read: “‘At sunset the embers are quenched, and any charred bones and fragments are mounded, covered with palm-leaves, and placed in an urn fashioned from a coconut shell and covered with a white cloth, for carrying to the sea. When the procession reaches the shore, the priest enters the water, and after having begged it to bear the ashes safely away, scatters them on the waves.’”

  “That has a beautiful sound to it,” Mrs. Mukhopadhyay remarked, licking the back of her spoon.

  Biscuit looked up, surprised, in perfect agreement.

  “Is there more?”

  She continued. “‘Further offerings are dedicated to the soul. Its last earthly ties are severed’—severed?”

  Mrs. Mukhopadhyay made a scissoring motion. “Snipped.”

  “Oh. ‘. . . are severed by the symbolism of burning a string and breaking an egg.’”

  Mrs. Mukhopadhyay chuckled. “I like that: an egg.”

  Biscuit looked at the clock. Four-thirty. It was her turn to make supper: meat loaf and rice. She and Paul each got supper duty once a week now. The custom had been instituted in the Ryrie household several months earlier, under the banner of We All Have to Pitch in More Now with a New Baby on the Way, and it had not been amended to reflect the fact that the new baby was dead. Meat loaf was supposed to be fun for kids to make, or so Biscuit’s mother had read or heard: the tactile experience of mixing all those ingredients by hand. Biscuit hated it, the cold, the greasy pink squish. “I have to go.”

  “Would you like to take the book home with you?”

  You were only allowed to check out adult books on an adult card. Mrs. Mukhopadhyay was offering to bend the rules for Biscuit. She flushed with pleasure yet muttered no, suddenly tongue-tied. She did not want her parents to see the book.

  Mrs. Mukhopadhyay put her spoon in the yogurt and leaned forward. She looked as though she were about to ask the question Biscuit had come most to dread, and which she’d find most especially dreadful coming from this, her special friend. Everyone had been asking this question—teachers, friends of the family, grown-ups whose names she didn’t know but who somehow knew hers. “How’s your mother?” or worse, “How’s Mom?” as if Biscuit’s mother were their mother, too. “Tell her I send my best,” they’d say. “Tell her we’re thinking about her.” As if they couldn’t tell her themselves. As if Biscuit’s mother had traveled somewhere far away, out of the reach of their voices, their words.

  But it occurred to Biscuit that if Mrs. Mukhopadhyay were to ask about her mother it would not be the same thing at all. If Mrs. Mukhopadhyay asked, there would be room to respond with something other than a pinched “fine.” There would be room to keep silent, or cry, or tell the truth.

  Then Mrs. Mukhopadhyay’s expression changed. She said, “Oh!” and placed a hand against her side. She looked up at Biscuit, her eyes wide. “A big one,” she explained.

  Biscuit got up from the librarian’s chair. She still held the book of funeral customs, with two hands.

  “You can leave it right there.” On the desk.

  “Thanks.”

  It was only a block to her house, too short. Biscuit walked it slowly, running her hand along the tops of low hedges where they lined the sidewalk. They were bare, bony, their twigs stiff brown bones. She had been to a funeral just once, when she was six. She remembered it very well, the physical details as well as the mood. It happened that on a summer evening just after she’d been tucked in, a sparrow had flown against her windowpane. She’d been lying awake, bored, looking out the window at the still-light greenness, and so she’d seen it happen. The thump of its body was terrible and quick. She’d run down the stairs in her short summer nightgown, slipped into the kitchen and out through the Dutch door. In her six-year-old mind it was a story that had already been written. She, its hero. Its ending, plain: with a stroke of her finger the sparrow would awaken and ascend in the dusk.

  The backyard was bathed in shadows of nightfall, just beginning to be lit by fireflies. She’d been aware of enjoying herself. Her skin tingled in the cooling air. Right through her nightie she could feel it. She’d never been outside alone in evening before. It had a smell, the evening grass and evening dirt. She paused to inhale it: the scent of a story about a girl who mends a bird and is rewarded for her kindness. She whispered to the bird inside her head: I’m coming.

  What reward? Every morning thereafter, the girl would awake to find a present under her pillow: a feather, a berry, a seed.

  Finding the sparrow proved too easy. It lay directly beneath her window, unbloodied, its feathers and beak and claws all more exact, more finely formed and particular than she’d imagined. She touched it, but it did not stir. She gathered it in her palm and carried it inside, hopeful. Her parents took it from her.

  The next day they’d all filed into the backyard. There was a shoe box coffin, lined with grass. Her father wore a necktie; her mother wore a dress. Paul, whose third-grade class had been doing limericks, recited a poem that began, “There once was a brown bird from Nyack.” Biscuit helped to dig the hole under the bridal wreath bush.The ground was hard, not soft. She hadn’t been able to make much difference; it was her father who got the hole big enough for the box. After, she helped to fill the hole back up with her hands and that earth was warm and crumbly. It stayed under her fingernails until her evening bath, in which she’d scraped out each caked half-moon: not regular dirt but funeral dirt. She soaked in it a long time, until the water grew cold. What she remembered best was the formal, slightly exalted feeling she had as she’d stood wearing her towel like a cape beside the tub after, watching her bathwater with its measure of ceremonial dirt circle the drain.

  7.

  Ricky came clean. Her first infidelity had lasted a weekend; her second lasted four months.

  The night John got drunk at Mero Mayor’s, he’d fallen asleep on the fold-out love seat in his office and woken at three, confused at first as to where he was but quickly oriented by the sick feeling in his gut, a feeling that had nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with fear. He realized, then, with a clarity bred of waking at a strange hour in a strange setting, waking dead sober out of his drunkenness, that fear is what it was, what he’d felt, what had been eating at him these weeks since the baby’s birth and death. Fear and not grief, and why was that?

  Because Ricky was not Ricky; Ricky was different, changed, not changed, he believed, as grief might legitimately alter someone, but changed in a way that was causing him dread. He might have been babbling incoherently when he’d raised the idea of her having an affair, and maybe Lance was right to have shushed him, but he hadn’t been entirely out of bounds. This he knew from the cold quiver in his gut. He knew it rising from the cheap love seat and stumbling out of his office down the hall to the men’s room to pee. He knew it putting on his shoes, lacing his goddamn shoes at three in the morning in the empty theater building and then exiting into the parking lot, fumbling with his key in the cold on the barren campus with the stars out, and the moon: he knew the danger of losing everything was real.

  It took him fifteen minutes to get home, which, if he’d been in a frame of mind to think about it, was scary: he was lucky he hadn’t been pulled over, or worse. He came into their bedroom and switched on the overhead light and Ricky sat up immediately: blinking, blinking, a sweet little cat, confused, her hair all pushed about with sleep. Except it turned out she hadn’t really been asleep, or not very. She’d been waiting for him to come home, she said. She’d been worried, she said, had kept waking, checking the clock, listening for his truck in the driveway.

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  “What?”
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  “If you were worried, why didn’t you try calling?” Tired as he was, exhausted, wanting badly to remove his shoes, his socks, his belt, his jeans, to lie on the cool white sheets, still he stood by the door, yards from her. She was sitting up in bed, cross-legged in a sleeveless nightgown, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes getting used to the light, her cheeks flushed, pink and pretty, like a cheap figurine of a schoolgirl.

  “I didn’t know if you’d want me to.You were the one who—Why didn’t you call?”

  So that much was out on the table: she thought he might not want her call. “You thought”—he wanted to get this right—“I was angry at you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, John. Why are you standing over there? Why don’t—Why aren’t you coming to bed?”

  He shook his head.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You tell me.” He could see she was afraid now.

  “Why don’t you tell me? What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head again.

  “I don’t understand.” Her voice quavered.

  “You tell me,” he repeated, and waited, and she began to cry. He crossed the room eventually, and sat on the bed and touched her foot through the blanket. But when she reached for him, went to lean her head on his shoulder, he pulled back.

  She sat up straight. “Tell you what?”