He does not remember working thirty years on the Philadelphia naval base. The black soot that he picked from underneath his nails every night. The upholstery samples that he carried door-to-door in the evenings, their ornate brocades like Braille only he could read. He does not remember Yiddish or the Torah. He does not remember how to wash a dish or how to hold a fork. How to speak. Being poor. Being middle class. How to write a check. How to fix an engine. How to wipe his own ass. How to make love. A family. How to call for them. Taste. Time.
V
2007.
This is a Jewish funeral in Northeast Philadelphia at a place called Goldstein’s on the side of teeming, litter-strewn Highway Seventy-Six. The place is gray and neon and inundated with sharp angles and low ceilings and a disharmony of colors. An aunt has called in her rabbi for the service because Irving has not been to synagogue in thirty years.
There are also a handful of grandchildren here, of whom I am the eldest. Eric is beside me in a yellow jumpsuit and handcuffs. We are sitting in the second row behind the “principal mourners”—Helen and her children: our mother, two aunts, and an uncle. Notoriously creative, my brother and I have draped a gray suit jacket over his shoulders and I hold his hands. My wrist shields the handcuffs. My brother’s keepers lean against a wall at the end of our pew. One of these officers is chewing gum and blowing tiny bubbles that he hooks back into his mouth with his tongue. I sneak him dirty looks in between greetings from old family friends. I resolve to keep an eye on them for a change.
Two days earlier, Goldstein had showed us around the casket room. He looks like a used-car salesman. He is middle-aged and fat and has a full head of gleaming white hair that looks waxed into place. A thick mustache is perched above his swollen lips. He’d said things like “and because your mother’s such a sweetheart, I’ll throw in an annual power washing for the stone there, free of charge!”
The casket room was dimmed, a series of stoic spotlights showcasing each open box, highlighting the delicate folds and tucks of plush satin lining, baby blue and angelic white. Goldstein led us through the maze, running his fat fingers over gleaming bronze handles, demonstrating their magnificent heft and polish, their leak-proof locking mechanisms. Most of the caskets looked overwhelmingly large on their pedestals. Some were child-sized. I stood behind my two aunts, my mother, and my grandmother and watched as Goldstein gently, dangerously toured us through our grief. He stopped occasionally to finger seals and talk numbers. When we were unresponsive he grew restless, excited even, a thin wash of sweat on his face. I sat on a bench while Goldstein went to get us some water. I watched as he handed my mother a plastic cup, slipped an arm around her waist, and led her to an immense mahogany number, all sexy curves and heavy, phallic handles. On clearance now, $7,999.
Irving Gordon, a lover of deals of all kinds, a penny pincher fitting the worst of Jewish stereotypes, would have balked at such a frivolous expense, cocking his thumb toward the precarious construction of two-by-fours in the corner before nodding his assent and retrieving his checkbook. Even this economy model, with its fraying rope handles and complete lack of any kind of leak-proofing, will run the savvy buyer a cool grand. I am sure Irving would have found irony in his last shameful scamming, the sum of his pittance from Veterans Affairs buried along with him. In this way and in others, we are wholly divorced from our heritage, eager to exchange the Jewish mandate that we bury our dead in a plain pine box for the easy comfort of knowing we gave him satin. Nonetheless, his women finally settled on a mid-range, Aurora brand box in “devotion silver” with adjustable handles, though sans adjustable headrest. This, Helen decided, will suffice.
In the end, Irving had grown so thin that Goldstein will have to pin his suit tenderly behind the shoulder blades, discreetly at the small of the back. He paints my grandfather’s face with smooth peach foundation and presses earthen rouge into the hollows of his cheeks. It is a surprisingly tactful reproduction, a tender, vain dressing of the corpse—horrific and exactly right.
After the funeral, the mourners disperse. The rabbi goes home. My brother must go back to jail. His keepers rap their thumbs on the side of an open van door, waiting. I slip Eric a cigarette and the cop nods and looks away, squinting into a light rain. Eric takes quick drags by bending down toward his hands, which, in addition to being shackled together, are linked to a heavy leather belt cinched tight around his skinny hips. His dark hair is cut too close to his scalp, light fuzz beginning to develop on his chin and jawline. He is twenty years old.
The first offense is theft, though many others will follow—a wildly colorful rap sheet—but the disease that makes him do such things is just an infant now, just an infant throwing its peas. Right now, Eric and I are more distraught by the way he is attending this funeral than we are by the death itself. Death, this time around, is a small grace, we think, though we don’t say so aloud. When I look at my mother, her face puffy with grief, I feel a love so large I can barely breathe, and beneath that is something so dark and ugly I am only just able to translate it into words—something like, At least you had your father for fifty-one years; we buried our father years ago. Grief tinged with envy. This thought is so terrifying and cruel I won’t be able to look her in the eyes for hours, only hold her close.
“Can’t they just let him come to the cemetery?” Helen asks loudly, for the benefit of the two officers.
They are growing impatient now. The big one unlocks a door and nods at Eric.
“All right, let’s go,” he says. Eric takes one last drag from his cigarette and flicks it into a puddle of mud.
“Now, wait a minute,” says Helen.
“Lady, you think this is a joke?” says one of the cops.
My mother and I gasp. We can’t believe someone would speak to Helen like that. Sweet, grieving, elderly Helen. My brother clenches his jaw. The women glare. The man senses his misstep and backs down some.
“All right, kid, let’s go. Give Grandma a hug and then get in the goddamn van, okay?”
Helen clutches onto her grandson’s bony shoulders, pulling him into her neck. I see Eric pull away at the waist, trying to keep his handcuffs from touching the swell of her stomach. She pulls him in harder. He gets into the van and they drive away.
VI
I hate to consider that we are merely a sum of our memories—those which our minds choose to hold on to, those which we cannot help but let go, despite ourselves. That’s all we have, I think, that’s all we are. These memories, however, are far from fixed. They shift with the changing tides of the water on our brains, the dubious salt of mere matter. A cold northeast wind, perhaps. Who can say for sure? Each remembering is different, each successive dredging more unreliable than the last. Our brains recreate (as a function of self-defense, or self-sabotage maybe) a slightly larger hand, a slightly longer hug, a steeper walk, a harder ache, a toothier smile, a smaller child. This time the joy was more acute, the eruption deeper, the color red not blue. This time it sounded from a distance; this time it felt more like this.
And the present? The present may be no more than three to twelve seconds, according to William James and a modest experiment at the turn of the last century—a compulsive attempt to “quantify” the present. Three to twelve seconds. A sip of wine. A violinist’s high C. A soccer ball drawing a white arc through the buggy air. Shifting the car into park. Failing to recognize your house key. Your own yellow toes. Samuel Johnson wrote that “the bright edge of consciousness moves quickly, and the present, after all, is in perpetual motion, a precarious ledge. It leaves us as soon as it arrives, ceases to be present before its presence is well perceived, and is only known to have existed at all by the effects which it leaves behind.” A heron beats his great wings against a southern-bound fog, lifts its long neck toward a hidden lolling sun, a dense rotating rudder raised to catch a breeze and shift direction. He leaves only a trail of memory in his wake. He is gone before he has even arrived. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard recounts an expe
rience, a moment of pure presence, in which she is simply petting a dog. As she is “patting the puppy,” however, she is suddenly gripped with the exquisite pleasure of the now, an overwhelming awareness of her own consciousness and its inexorable end. “This is it,” she writes, “right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain.” Then it is over.
I feel this level of consciousness rarely. A moment of such clarity and self-awareness, the sense of brick and brain and the wood beneath my bare feet, of skin and wind and the rush, rush of cars passing and time tumbling over its shoelaces. The fly dancing down a windowpane, the robotic, slow-motion twitching of its legs when it lands on my wrist. That particular itch.
VII
2007.
Day one of Shiva. My mother and I wake late. She smokes a cigarette and we drink good coffee. There is a message on her answering machine from Helen.
“Susan, it’s your mother. I just wanted to remind you to wear your black mourner’s button because the rabbi will be here tonight and I think, well, I think he’s kind of checking.”
My mother on one couch, me on the other, we stare each other in the face and laugh. Then we cry. The two dogs hear the commotion and come bounding into the living room. They are panting and their tails are going and they trip over each other’s legs trying to get to my mother. They careen into her shins and topple onto her bare feet. They are looking at her anxiously, waiting to know just what is going on. We have to get our shit together.
“Get your shit together,” my mother says.
And so, finally, we do. We finish our coffees and I take our cups into the kitchen. I hear my mother light another cigarette and speak softly to her dogs.
“It’s okay,” she tells them. “This is okay.”
My mother and I arrive at Helen’s house. She’s forgotten her mourner’s button after all. In truth, I think she lost it. Helen’s house is still empty, except for the rabbi, and we start unwrapping trays of bagels and fishes and sliced red onions.
“Actually,” our new rabbi says, “Shiva is traditionally seven days but we just don’t have time for that anymore. People still have to make a living—even rabbis.”
I am instructed to contemplate the cyclical nature of life and death as I grab a poppy seed bagel from a basket and slather on some scallion cream cheese; the round foods that are always served during Shiva are meant to drive this concept home. After a couple of bites I decide I do my best contemplating with a glass of wine, so this is just going to have to wait.
I am under the impression that this is a time for the “principal mourners” to rest, to reflect, to eat a lot. Yet Helen is still scurrying around the house, draping old dish towels over the mirrors in order to keep out the spirits and discourage vanity (but mostly, I think, to show off in front of the rabbi). When we finally get hold of her, her eyes are wide and panicky, her full face drawn together into a fierce look of concern.
“Sit,” we say, but she never listens, either, just like Mr. G. She has to clean the powder room toilet before company arrives.
At sundown in Helen’s house we all stand in a circle and say a prayer we do not know in a language we cannot understand. Helen’s face is serious as the rabbi sings the lilting Hebrew and the rest of us stumble through the English translation in what appear to be purple Prayer Books for Dummies. I am sitting on the steps with my little cousins, four and six and seven years of age, their newly acquired Hebrew in perfect unison. I am struck by the conviction of their Hebrew school educations (an education I never had), and I say a silent prayer for my brother and for the cousins, too—a prayer that this faith will be more sustaining for them than the one I am struggling to erect for myself.
But it feels good to stand with family, friends, and some strangers, and say a prayer of something, out loud, together. We say it for him.
VIII
2006.
We are visiting Irving at the nursing home, the whole family. The staff is throwing a hula party where we all dress up in grass skirts and bright leis to dance to quick beats and loose rhythms—the nurses and the families, and his favorite gal, nurse Jane, with the green smock and the ice cream spoon. I dance in front of Irving. I am lip-synching to Jimmy Buffet and Irving is thinking oy gevalt, crazy girl, what’s her name—or is it just flashes of color sweeping across his blank, blue eyes? Eric has dressed him in an old Eagles’ jersey. We are devoted football fans. The shirt is baggy on Irving and reaches his knees, but Eric likes this and says, “Poppop’s chillin’.”
Eric is eighteen now, a popular high school senior. He uses vocabulary that he learns from rap songs and tries it out on Irving, who is inspecting his new shirt. Mom and I dance while Helen chats up the nurses. Mom is a better dancer than I am and she knows it. She has more rhythm. She does a slow tango with herself, one hand on her stomach and the other arm draped over an imaginary partner. An old man in a military jacket wants to know if I’ve seen Agnes. A nurse starts to feed him a virgin margarita through a straw and he sucks hard and smiles and licks his lips.
“How’s my love, Mr. G?” Helen says, covering her husband’s hand with hers.
I keep dancing and reach toward him, bringing my palms to rest on his cheeks. Beneath the blare of that old radio, the silence still stings. Rather than suffer the indignities of his mistakes, it seemed Irving made the decision not to speak at all. It happened early on and almost overnight. I pull at his cheeks, then press them together to purse his lips. Smack—a kiss—and I swear he’s smiled; wondered at that nose, that freckle; said my name. We are dancing to a restoration that will never come, swaying to a lost identity. But for now, he is slumped over the wheelchair handlebars and drooling onto his lap, holding my hand, and watching his family dance this dance, this dance, this dance, this dance.
How long?
Three to twelve seconds. There to here.
A SECOND OF STARTLING REGRET
TWO TINY MOUTHS emerge from a bed of hay and sticks and yellowed leaves, brown beaks chomping on desiccated air. Black eyes blink frantically. The new hawks swallow the dust that rises in plumes from a dry nest as they beat their wings and scuttle their webbed feet. Their mother tucks her chin to her breast and nibbles at an insect burrowing into her feathers. She lifts her head to the sky. A cloud stutters in front of the midday sun and there is a second of shadow and chill and the yellow electric tinge of danger. She is completely still.
A great wind moves suddenly and the big hawk shudders and heaves, her long neck expanding and contracting, her bird-boned shoulders pressing back tightly. Her head moves in rapid, twitching circles. Stiffened wings beat quickly against her swollen flank and the two young hawks caw wildly in anticipation of food, careening forward and over one another, mouths ajar. With one final downward thrust, the mother hawk inserts her curved beak into a waiting mouth and deposits a churned, milky stream of food. The little bird chokes and spits its breakfast to the ground.
My mother sifts through an oversized pocketbook. She digs past a fat wallet stuffed with credit cards, a smattering of wrinkled business cards (her own and others), ChapSticks and lighters and loose tobacco and empty pill bottles. She pulls out the soft, green corduroy case that contains her glass pipe and a big bag of good pot.
We sit on her back patio at dusk: Eric, Mom, and me. This is where we land whenever I am in limbo, between moves or jobs or schools; we collect like tumbleweeds into the hollow of the backyard. We hunker down like weatherworn old men, sated for a moment with warm food and red wine and an old familiarity that settles the heart. We drink and tell stories and smoke cigarettes. This night, in 2007, is August warm and the sky is beginning to darken, heavy on our shoulders like a navy blanket. My brother takes a long pull from the bowl, prodding expertly at the hot orange bud with the corner of his red lighter. His brow is furrowed, and as he exhales there is a moment when his face softens and his eyes roll back and he is no longer twenty-one bu
t six, or five, or three, before he has learned the plain facts of death and disease and the self-sabotaging brain.
I have just returned from a summer spent studying at Oxford after three weeks of traveling alone in Scotland and so I start to tell them about midnight on the Isle of Skye, off the western coast of Scotland, which in June means wet fog and violet skies and loud pubs that pulsate with the heavy trill of local fiddlers. Neither Eric nor my mother has ever left the States so I am being especially specific, as if I could transfer the memories directly, as if I could give them away like postcards.
“Yeah, that’s cool,” Eric says. “That’s real cool. I’ve been on a trip, too—a real trip. To the psycho doctor. And I am now the proud owner of a bipolar diagnosis!” He pauses to light the bowl. “The guy said it like I won something.” Eric lowers his chin, exhales, and clears his throat. “‘And with your family history . . . Yep, you’ve got it, kid!’”
“Well, we can see how he’s taken to the art of self-medicating,” says my mother.
The three of us shrug and nod and take long sips from stemmed glasses. I haven’t lived at home for nearly six years. I’ve never lived in this house, actually, the farmhouse that looms behind us, our mother’s dream home, which she bought the year after I left for college when the real estate bubble had not yet burst, when she was still making money. The farmhouse blocks the noise of traffic and the bushes obscure the strip mall that has taken over the land that once comprised the farm’s acreage, many decades ago. On nights like this, when the parking lot has gone still and the day’s business has ended, we are able to pretend the safety lights still burning at Genuardi’s Supermarket are pieces of the moon and the deer crunching over dead leaves are after fallen stalks of corn, and not the rubbish overflowing the dumpsters. Illusions like these are what keep us coming back together; we are practiced in the art of pretend. We are able to convince ourselves that drinking and smoking are incidental, and not part of the fabric of our family, of the shared anxieties that causes us, each to varying degrees, to feel so dissatisfied with our own brain chemistry. We are trying to return to a place of innocence, to the time before, when Mother could still keep us safe.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 7
