Exit Laughing

by Victoria Zackheim

  Theresa didn’t know what to say, other than “Aunt Molly’s always been difficult.”

  “Duh,” whispered Mrs. Feinberg, but Theresa heard her anyway and ignored it.

  For entertainment, Molly watched ancient game shows (hosted by old TV personalities with terrible toupees) on the small set on her nightstand, did word puzzles, rewrote her will, and when she was bored with those things, insisted that the staff move her to another room. Each of Molly’s rooms (some of which she had lived in a half dozen times before) had a shelf life of about two months, and then Molly began complaining. The rooms were either too hot or too cold, or her roommates snored or the sitcoms they watched were idiotic, or their visitors were rude, loud, inconsiderate, and smelled of foreign food. She complained that she was too close to the elevator, or too close to the kitchen where the smell of normal American food (“such as it is in this place,” Molly said) made her sick.

  It was easier for the staff to shift Molly from one floor to another, from one room to another, than listen to her complaints. The staff knew that the only time Molly’s mouth was still was when the rest of her was in motion.

  Though Molly had never been married nor had any children of her own (which was just as well, since she was one of those all-too-common adults whose interest in children was mainly punitive), she did have Theresa and Theresa’s four sisters, five nieces in all, the sweet Sweeney girls. Unfortunately, on the rare times that they were all together, Molly liked to remind the girls of their terrible past haircuts, misspent youths, their wild, old, wanton ways, then she segued into their present polyester clothes, the cheap shoes on their feet, their spoiled children, and their poor taste in husbands, all of whom she’d described, at one time or another, as “the dumbest man on God’s green earth.”

  Molly’s nieces, sweet as they were, hated her, and who would blame them?

  Why, even their late mother, the semibeatified, compassionate, tolerant, loving pillar of the church, Margaret Sweeney, had hated Molly too.

  (On the morning after Bill Sweeney’s funeral, Margaret Sweeney, wearing a green chenille robe whose pockets bulged with sodden tissues, got out of bed, staggered into the kitchen, and picked up a Mass card someone had left on the counter. When she saw Molly’s signature scrawled across the bottom, she tore the Mass card in half and stuffed it into the garbage. “At least we’re done with that son of a bitch,” Margaret said, ignoring the shocked expressions of her five daughters who were sitting around the table amidst the unopened fruit baskets, methodically plowing their way through a pink box filled with fresh donuts, their elbows stuck to the plastic tablecloth with confectioner’s sugar.)

  One winter afternoon, from her current room at the Forest Overlook, Molly called Theresa and complained (in what Theresa thought was the world’s most irritating voice) that she hadn’t seen any of her nieces for years, that their father, her only brother, Bill, would be ashamed of all of them, that ignoring their aunt was a form of elder abuse, especially now that she was ninety years old and also on her deathbed.

  Theresa, the fair, sympathetic person she is, felt guilty.

  “Sometimes, the residents know more than we realize,” Mrs. Feinberg told Theresa when she called. “If your aunt says she’s dying, well, she just might be right.”

  The next day, Theresa forced herself and cajoled her four sisters into leaving their twelve collective unbathed children home on Long Island in the care of those “dumb” but tired husbands, with all of their kitchen tables covered with smudged ditto sheets filled with half-assed homework. She picked everyone up, and they headed off to Queens. It was a freezing weeknight, and the sisters, except for Theresa, were drowsy and half asleep, until Exit 41N when their Dodge Caravan hit a patch of ice and for a few sickening seconds slid sideways. Then everyone sat up and suddenly came alive, an angry nest of buzzing hornets. Why were they doing this? they asked each other (while Theresa held onto the steering wheel with white knuckles). Daddy was dead, for Christ’s sake, and here they were, mothers with children, risking life and limb for the old bitch whom they hated beyond belief. She was going to hell anyway, and this was the last time they’d see her, dead or alive, since none of them was going to her wake. As far as any of them cared, they yelled (except Theresa, who had noticed a bus behind her and had started praying), “Mrs. Feinberg could stick Aunt Molly into a black Hefty bag and drag her to the curb.” If they got home alive, the younger girls said, and Theresa wanted to see Aunt Molly ever again, she’d have to go by herself. The rest of them were O-U-T.

  “Whatever,” said Theresa, praying to St. Christopher, who was now discredited, and therefore a little bit useless.

  Five angry freckled faces trudged through the heavy Forest Overlook front door and into the vestibule. The sisters stepped on the Oriental rug cemented to the nonstick tile floor, past the brass flowerpot (overflowing with plastic, variegated philodendron) on the tiny cherry table, then into a lobby filled with little loveseats, all covered like matching doll furniture in the same little burgundy and navy blue itty-bitty flower print, then shrinkwrapped, somehow, in waterproof, non-glare plastic.

  Into the elevator and off, down the hall the sisters went, skirting the old people double-parked in wheelchairs outside their rooms, past the empty rec room where the TV blared with ads for hair dye and frozen pizza (frantically devoured by ecstatic families gathered around banquet-sized tables in palatial kitchens).

  Five sisters, even Theresa, one common thought: Freaking old freaking fuck-face Aunt Molly.

  But everything changed when they got to the door of Aunt Molly’s room and found themselves face-to-face not with Aunt Molly’s cranky, scowling northern end, but her in-your-face and very naked southern end. The poor thing! they thought, seized with pity for the poor old woman with her nightgown up around her waist, her shrunken legs kicking like a Rockette, her nether parts not only shockingly bald but also very crumpled-up, looking for all the world like something that forgot to put in its teeth.

  Aghast by what was before their eyes, for the Sweeney sisters were good Irish Catholic girls who had never seen such an expanse of “out-there” womanhood, not even their own (although they came of age in the feminist 1970s, not one of them had ever bought so much as a speculum), the girls rushed to the old lady’s bed so fast that they bunched up in the doorway and when they got free, Amy, the youngest, was sent flying halfway across the room.

  They were in such a semihysterical frenzy to get to those blankets at the foot of Aunt Molly’s bed, restore her dignity by covering up, if not the Sweeney family jewels, then surely the Sweeney family purse, that they forgot to look at her face.

  Until Amy, who’d walked to the head of the bed, shrieked, “This isn’t Aunt Molly!”

  At that moment, Aunt Molly was in the room across the hall, propped up in what would be (five years later) her deathbed, but in the meantime, there she was, surrounded by puzzle books, watching a thirty-year-old rerun of Family Feud and cutting all of them out of the will.

  So the Grim Reaper walks into a bar and orders a beer and a mop.

  Listen up, Grim Reaper. If everything goes okay, I have about twenty years before you and I hook up, and I’ve got to tell you that, so far, you’ve taken too many in my family, and now you’re starting in on my friends. I mean, plucking my son Jamie out of our lives was one thing, those first few years when I felt as though my body were turned inside out, and then dragged through gravel, and then there was my nephew and those two premature grandsons I never got to know. That was bad enough, but now Paula, my neighbor and friend of thirty-one years—well, she’s gone too. For thirty-one years, through all of those seasons, she stood at her kitchen window and I stood in my yard, where (over the fence and through the thicket of trees) we talked each other’s ears off and laughed ourselves sick. We’d had so much history. City girls, the two of us, not yet thirty years old when we first met, she was from Brooklyn and I was from Queens, and neither one of us was crazy about the flora and fauna of li
ving in the sticks. Our mothers (her Italian Rosie, someone who claimed to have once danced in Atlantic City with Bert Parks, and mine, the Irish Helen, who claimed to have once had a conversation with Jackie Gleason in Bickford’s Cafeteria, improbable as that might sound, with all the time Jackie Gleason had spent in Toots Shor’s) were each a handful.

  Paula and I raised rambunctious children; both of us buried sons.

  Paula and I laughed about the day my older son took the bag of garbage instead of his lunch to school and the time that he suction-cupped Christmas ornaments to his forehead and couldn’t get them off.

  We laughed about the day I saw the red-jacketed prowler in the yard, and Paula chased him through the woods with the fireplace poker. With Paula’s kitchen window closed and the blinds so tightly drawn, things are so quiet.

  I’m old enough, Mr. Grim Reaper, sir, to see you all over the place. You’re everywhere I look, breathing down a neck, sitting on a shoulder, up to your eyeballs (if you even have eyeballs) in mankind, humanity’s constant companion, the companion everyone hates. You have no social skills; you tell no jokes. (Something tells me that humor is not exactly your forte, but don’t give up hope. In another million or so years, maybe you’ll become funny. As Alan Alda’s character, Lester, said in Woody Allen’s movie Crimes and Misdemeanors, “Comedy is just tragedy plus time.”) I don’t think you can sing or dance. Except for the overdosed quarterback here, and the reckless pitcher in the Porsche there, you don’t seem to favor any one sport, nor follow any particular team. When you’re out there picking and choosing, one self-destructive athlete is as good as another.

  No one ever invites you to get-togethers. Can you blame them? Imagine yourself walking through someone’s living room. All of that shrieking and yelling and guests all over the place, plastered to the walls, jumping through the windows. What fun would that be for you, standing there all alone, hanging off the mantle?

  No one ever invites you to dinner. Can’t you take a hint? Where would the host or hostess seat you? The minute you sat down, why, everyone else would run out of the room—half a dozen people stomped on and crushed. (You’d get a hernia dragging home—wherever your home is exactly—all that fresh meat.) Not to mention the empty chairs and that nightmare of leftovers.

  And speaking of a host or hostess—who would want to greet you at the door, take your scythe and stick it in the umbrella stand, take your long black hoodie and lay it across the bed?

  Who wants to know if the Grim Reaper goes commando?

  Nobody invites you along on vacation. The Grim Reaper on a cruise ship—well, it just wouldn’t work. The minute you entered the dining room—first seating, second seating, it wouldn’t matter—everyone jumping out of their seat, huddling on the other side of the boat, and before you know it, the whole shebang is on its side, and there’s Shelley Winters swimming past the porthole.

  I don’t go to the gym, but I do read the papers, and it seems you sometimes stalk around weight rooms, waiting for those out-of-shape middle-aged men to bench press 350 pounds. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that you’ve been spotted at the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, licking your well-concealed lips at the fat people walking around with those plates piled high with shrimp toast and crab rangoon.

  (Sometimes, I sense you following me through the mall, and from all the frantic shopping all around me—well, I’m not the only one who feels that way.)

  You’re getting old now, Grim—happens to the best of us. After a million or so years in the same line of work, with no hope of either advancement or retirement (no Arnold Palmer Retirement Village for you and certainly no gold watch: you have neither golf pants nor wrists), even a Reaper like yourself starts to slow down. It’s not like the good old days, with all of those plagues, the oozing, the bleeding, the pustules (I’ll bet you haven’t seen a good-sized pustule since the last hoarfrost). With people living longer, you’ve got no job security. The handwriting is on that wall. (Have you considered a second job? Working extra days and nights? Graveyard shift?)

  From what I can see, you’re not exactly the sharpest crayon in the box. You don’t seem to understand that you should leave the babies and young people alone and instead take only those who are very, very old, the ones being chased down eternity’s corridors by far too many machines.

  Not to be negative, but I think you’re very rude. You plucked my nephew from this life before he’d finished his one last poem. You took my little grandsons much too early, just grabbed them from their mother’s womb. You didn’t have permission to take my son from that hospital bed, and neither did you ask Paula before taking her baby from that bassinet. (I’d like to think of all of those boys together, in some field-of-dreams stadium, my mother, Helen, and Paula’s mother, Rosie, sitting together in the stands, watching all of those boys playing the baseball games they were denied in life, cheering them on in those cigarette-roughened voices.)

  I know, of course, that none of this is your fault, and that “kill the messenger” is not a literal statement, no matter how tempting the idea. After all, you, too, answer to a higher authority.

  Even if it was advertent, there were things you left behind. Not a hat, not an umbrella (not a hoodie, not a scythe), but memories. Not so much in the scheme of things, I suppose, but they’re mine to keep, and I’ll take what I can get. My nephew, sitting in front of me in his wheelchair, arguing with me about the existence of God (by now, he knows who was right), and then there was my second premature grandson, the one I got to hold, the one whose forehead I got to kiss.

  There’s my last memory of my son, when the him of him was gone and his dear body looked like driftwood lying there in that hospital bed, pure, white, beautiful, as though whittled out of birch or ash.

  Then there’s Paula, lit up in that kitchen window for all eternity, with all the laughter that passed between us snagged like webbing somewhere on that fence, or somewhere in the ivy that’s wrapped around the trees.

  Murphy, O’Brien, and Kelly are in a Dublin pub, hoisting a few, when the talk turns to wakes, and what they’d like people standing over their caskets to say about them. “I’d like people to say that I was a hard worker and took good care of my family,” said Murphy. “I’d like people to say that I was an upstanding member of the community and I took good care of my mother,” said O’Brien. Then it was Kelly’s turn. “I’d like people to say, ‘Would ye look at that? He’s moving!’ ”

  When my eighty-year-old mother-in-law, a “gambling granny,” fell and broke her hip, we thought she was a goner. We should have known better. She had surgery, pins in her hip, and she recovered. Then she fell again, and broke her other hip. She had more surgery, more pins, laughing along with us at our lame “Bionic Nana” jokes, and again she recovered. Then she fell and broke her shoulder. No surgery, no pins this time, yet she recovered. Then she fell again, and this time it was the “mother lode,” so to speak, of Mom’s injuries. She fractured her skull.

  When we went to see her, half of her face was exactly the same as ever, but the other half was black and purple, swollen as an eggplant. Her cheeks, pressed to mine, had always felt soft as an antique linen tablecloth, but after the fractured skull, her face looked as pitted as an orange peel and somewhat leathery. I looked into her soft, dark eyes, trying not to cry. Mom hadn’t seen her own face at all, and didn’t know how bad she looked. “You should see the other guy,” she said, and instead of crying, relieved at how much herself she seemed, we laughed.

  Because nobody had told us anything different, we figured Mom was doing fine, but she was in an overwhelmed, understaffed city hospital where nobody explained to us that in a head injury, especially in an old person, the damage is not always immediate, that bleeding takes a while to spread throughout the skull, and sometimes the full damage takes a while to assess. We thought the fractured skull would be like the other injuries, that she would heal and be back to herself, but that didn’t happen.

  When she was in the hospital, Mom was t
hat familiar self for only a short time, and then, suddenly, she wouldn’t open her eyes, and she fell into a state of shuddering and continual yawning, in and out of something resembling sleep. It was as if one day my husband, Patrick, was helping her unwrap the saltines on her dinner tray, and the next day he was spoon-feeding her, and the day after that, the tray sat untouched in front of her, and she was unresponsive. We were bewildered, not knowing if Mom heard or understood anything we said to her. It didn’t look good.

  One afternoon, when Patrick went off to look for the doctor, I took matters into my own hands, so to speak. Standing by the side of the bed, I rubbed her arm. She had been a good mother-in-law to me, and I loved her. I took her hand, a miniature version of her son’s, and held it softly. “It’s okay to let go,” I told her, “we’ll be okay. Just go to the light.”

  At that moment, her eyelids flew open and she looked at me with something like shock, and for a minute I felt like a Judas. (True, I’d always had my eye on her Depression-era, cranberry-glass candy dish, but I could wait.)

  “What light?” she asked me. “I’m going to Atlantic City!”

  She never got there of course, but her skull healed, and she went back to her apartment, where she became someone like her former self, only newly assertive: a Nana who called Life Alert when she couldn’t close her bedroom window, a Nana who called the fire department when she wanted to watch Channel 2 and had lost the remote controller in the bedcovers, a Nana who then called the mayor’s office to complain about the racket and the mess the firemen made when they came with their axes and broke down her front door.