Happy Family (29 page)

C
heri hesitates outside the door to Michael's office. She's been back in there only once, to put the box of his ashes on his desk because she had no idea what to do with them. Michael, with all of his obsessing over her watching him go into the fire and detailed instructions for his memorial/premiere party—right down to the cocktail recipes—was mute on the subject of his mortal remains. She'd told the lady at the funeral home no to putting Michael in a columbarium, an urn, having him made into a ring, or hanging him in a portrait; she'd just take him to go. But now she has to reenter HMS Bay, since Bertrand wants her to send him
The Palmist
files from Michael's computer. She's been putting off the task for long enough, and she certainly doesn't have the excuse of being too busy. She'd said no to Samuelson's invitation to take back her classes “with modifications” and could no more listen to news about the Iraq museum's losses than she could revisit her book or write anything more than a grocery list.

She cracks a window to relieve the stuffiness. A breeze blows in, riffling a movie poster on the wall that's come untacked on one side. The afternoon light looks dusty. The plain brown box of ashes is right where she left it, by Michael's computer next to a vase of deeply dead lilacs. As a parting gift, Cici had filled the house with “new life.” Cici's fluffing up HMS Bay felt like a violation, but Cheri has to admit that it's thanks to her mother that putting on pants is now an almost daily occurrence. The air no longer smells of nag champa or sickbay or, she realizes sadly, Michael.
Are you ready?

When she sees Michael's face come to life on the screen, it startles her. Like he'll come up behind her saying, “What the hell are you doing on my computer? And by the way, did you read my journal?” She fast-forwards through
The Palmist
video files, catching bits of what he says. Images move in time-lapse; his eyes sink deeper into his face, he goes from sitting, to being propped up in a hospital bed, to lying down. His voice grows thin and raspy. “How do I live while dying?” The light is crepuscular; his face is partially shadowed. She lets it play: “The dirty little secret is that I had a fantasy that I'd find the answer
out there
. And I'd be healed. But whatever anyone said to me, it all boiled down to: believe. My rational mind wasn't having any of that. ‘Fake it until you make it'…if I had a nickel for every time I said that. Then I remembered what I'd witnessed with this monk in Thailand. He was a meth addict dying a painful death on the streets, his face covered in sores. He had gangrene. I asked him how he had lost his way. He said that there was no way to lose, that everything—good and bad—was all experience. ‘Nothing to do, nothing to change, everything is perfect as it is.' If we accept what is, then there's no conflict. No conflict, no suffering. No suffering and we are at peace. I could tell looking into his eyes that he knew this, not in his mind, but in his heart. Despite his miserable circumstances, this man had dignity. And, finally, I got it. It's not about the mind; it all comes from the heart.” Cheri has no stomach for this. She powers down the computer, then yanks every last tentacle from the wall. Bertrand can have the whole damn thing.

Her weekly talks with Marlene—she'd cut the
Dr.
crap—is her only social life. She is sick of herself, of being in this house.

As she lifts Michael's computer onto the counter at the UPS Store, she thinks she is done with inertia. Peanuts and bubble wrap—hell, yes. Insure it for the highest amount possible, and get it there as fast as possible. Why not say yes? She didn't have to stay in Chicago. She could start over, move to another state or out of the country because she had no ties and, for the moment, no job. Buy all the guns she wanted and go around the country to every three-gun competition there was and call that her life. Yes to telling Samuelson take your handcuffed job and fuck it. She has money and doesn't need to be ashamed of it or hide it from anyone anymore. Hell, if she could figure out something she was inspired to research, she could fund her own trips, or even become a donor, greasing the wheels on any number of projects. She walks home feeling the late-summer sun on her face like a warm slap telling her to wake up and get on with her life.

“It's okay to feel relieved. Even excited at the prospect of new beginnings. That's understandable, even necessary,” Marlene says. “You're familiar with the pink-cloud syndrome, I'm sure.”

Cheri is distracted by the ass prints on Marlene's faux-suede couch. Looks like there was a couple here before her. Shouldn't the good doctor rake the couch to clear it, like in a Japanese stone garden? “I'm sober and can conquer the world?” Cheri says. “And after the pink cloud comes the crash of reality. Not really into Big Book–speak.”

“I wasn't referring only to your being sober. Loss isn't a cold that lasts for a few days and is gone. But I want to return to Cici's visit first,” Marlene says. “It sounds like she showed some real emotional honesty. It couldn't have been easy for her to tell you she'd lost a child before she adopted you.”

“No, it wasn't,” Cheri says and then pauses. “Now that I think about it, my entire childhood was spent filling a void I didn't even know existed and could never fill anyway. It's ironic because before Michael died, we'd gone to a funeral for a baby. I was unhinged. They all kept insisting it was a ‘celebration of life,' that we needed to be grateful for the hours the baby was here on earth. What bullshit. If my math is right, Cici adopted me right after she lost her own baby. One puppy dies so you rush out and buy a new one?” Cheri meets Marlene's gaze. “It was like there was this shadow child the whole time I was growing up.”

“A shadow child…that's quite common to feel when a child in the family dies and everyone must go on. Usually there's a lot of guilt. Especially if your mother didn't have time to process the death. Was her baby a girl?”

“A boy. It's funny—when I was a kid, people mistook me for a boy. Cici was always trying to girl me up. I thought it was to make me look more like her, but maybe it was so I didn't remind her of him? She put so much on me. I was her everything; it felt like she was stalking me with her love. Her happiness was all tied up in her being my mother—Sol was jealous of that. She told me that she got very depressed after the baby died. It sounded like she was nearly suicidal…”

“So you were her salvation.”

“Or consolation prize. Maybe it was better I didn't know. You need a flow chart in my family to know who knew what about whom at any given point. Moments of emotional honesty are few and far between.”

“Did it change anything, when Cici told you that she knew about Catherine?”

“They say kids of divorce secretly wish their parents would get back together. Well, it was the opposite for me. I always wanted them to get a divorce and be done with the lies.”

“And why do you think they didn't?”

“Her whole identity was wrapped up in being the wife of a rich, important man and living on the Upper East Side. Bought off with baubles. I didn't exactly hide my feelings about her…choices.” Cheri hesitates for a moment. “But what do I know about my parents' relationship? She said she was happy with Sol in the end; maybe he told her he'd broken up with the woman and they had a come-to-Jesus moment. Give all the credit, and the blame, to the Catholic Church. As much fun as it is deconstructing my family mythos, it doesn't change what happened.”

“As an exercise,” Marlene says, “what if you stepped back and looked at them not as your parents but just as two flawed people, doing the best they could at the time? If you can separate your expectations of them as your parents from who they are as people and see them in a larger context, then it's easier to let go of not getting what you needed from them.”

“Does it all come down to not getting what you need from Mommy and Daddy?” Cheri doesn't hide her irritation. “I'm a grown woman. This is what I hate about therapy. It all boils down to whining about your relationship with your parents. I want to deal with
today.
I want to get over
this
patch.”

“You know how to go out in the world and accomplish. When you're ready to do that again, you will. And what you ‘do' may look and feel very different when you've actually dealt with your grief. Past and present. Right now, your work is to let the empty spaces be empty.”

Cheri sighs; another version of nothing to do, nothing to change. “Well, I'm thinking about doing that somewhere else. Getting out of town for a while.”

“I'm going to point out that there's a pattern here,” Marlene says. “When things get too tough emotionally—”

“I knew you'd say that. Taking a break isn't the same thing as running away. I haven't a clue what I want in any area of my life, but I'm not going to figure it out until I get some perspective.”

“Do you have something in mind?”

“My friend Taya has a house she never uses in Malibu and is always saying I can come stay there. I hate the sun almost as much as I hate the West Coast, but it's far away from here.”

“Sometimes you have to go to the least likely place in order to find what you're looking for,” Marlene says, “especially perspective.”

It had been years since Cheri had been to LA. She'd gone for a conference once when she was still a TA, and another time for Taya's extravaganza of a wedding. She'd had the typical East Coast aversion to it then but, to her amazement, finds it appealing now. Being in transition herself, why not go to a place where the very ground was unstable, where people were coming and going in various stages of hope and disappointment? Michael had had a brief flirtation with Hollywood in the early seventies and lived in Venice. It was before her time, when
Disco, Doughnuts, and Dogma
was the coolest of the cool and he was being courted to make features. He'd enjoyed a whole
Easy Rider
period prowling up and down the California coast. She pictures young Michael on his motorcycle, his Jew-fro bobbing in the breeze, wearing one of his many ponchos.

“Thank God you're going to get out of that place,” Taya says when Cheri calls to ask if she can stay in her beach house. “You should seriously consider selling it. I would have immediately.”

“So that's a yes?”

“Yes, but I think it's insane for you to stay in Malibu. It's beautiful, but it's isolated.” Taya's voice competes with blitzes of a blender.

“Sounds perfect,” Cheri says.

“Two things, though. No smoking. Including on the deck; the smoke gets into the wood. And take care of Skipperdee.” How could smoke penetrate wood and what the hell was a skipperdee, Cheri thinks. “Skipperdee, as in the turtle from Eloise,” Taya rambles on in the face of Cheri's silence. “You know, the girl who lived in the Plaza?”

“Take care of the turtle and no smoking, got it.”

“Cat,” Taya says, “Skipperdee is a cat. Long story short, the dogs almost killed him so he lives at the beach house. Laura, the housekeeper, comes and feeds him but if you're there, it's on you. Shit, this fucking thing is stuck. I'm on a liquid diet because I'm so fat I can't see my vagina over my stomach. Gotta go.”

LA is just like Cheri pictured it: brown haze squatting on the horizon, cars and more cars, rows of palm trees in the glinty sprawl. No, she doesn't want to pay a thousand dollars a month for a new Camry. She'll take a long-term rental on that Buick that looks like a seventies cop car and squeals when she pulls out of the lot. It's not until she gets her first glimpse of the coast unfolding like a party invitation that she's glad she said yes to coming here.

Laura, a short sunburst of a Latina, is standing in front of a white stucco house with turquoise shutters holding a fistful of keys and instructions for how to work everything from electronic shades and pool covers to the cat, a talkative Siamese look-alike with folded ears. “I am a house manager and organizer, not a housekeeper,” she says briskly, “but if you have any miscellaneous questions, you can call my cell.” She walks through the house with Cheri, pointing out its many features, most of which Cheri's sure she'll never use. “These are Taya and the kids' favorites,” Laura says, putting a bag in the fridge, “tamales—cheese and chili and pork. My cousin makes them. Warm them in the oven, not the microwave.” And then she's gone and Cheri is alone with a cat and a whole lot of white furniture.

She can't sleep that night. The sounds coming from the coast highway are too unfamiliar, the ocean with its unceasing pull and push. At least the repetition quiets the thoughts of Marlene's so-called empty spaces that snap and bite like fish at the water's surface. Just as Taya promised, Malibu is an insular outpost that shutters early and doesn't do delivery. She starts reading a book, puts it down and starts another, only to put it down too. She wanders through the house, pours herself a tumbler full of booze from the bar cart. Taya's become so grown up: the second home, professionally taken photographs of her and the kids beaming from silver frames placed just so, the bar cart. People Cheri's age are living such fancy lives and decanting.

Cheri sits on the bottom step of the deck, staring at the ocean like it's a fire. She prefers the beach at night, the oyster-shell moon, the way the sand is firm from the moist air. The ocean reminds her that there's something bigger than herself. She could walk Michael's ashes into the water one of these nights. Let the box float until it drifts out of sight. When she closes her eyes, she sees Michael's gaunt face toward the end, eyes vacant. She walks the beach. Her feet get cold and damp. She walks in no particular pattern, like a songline. The sun is almost rising by the time she returns.