Life Expectancy (5 page)

5

A
t nine o’clock on the evening of Wednesday, September 14, my parents and I met in their dining room to have as heavy a dinner as we might be able to stand up from without our knees buckling.

We were also gathered to discuss once more the wisest strategies for getting through the fateful day that lay just three hours ahead of me. We hoped that in a prepared and cautious state of mind, I might reach September 16 as unscathed as the three little pigs after their encounter with the wolf.

Grandma Rowena joined us to speak from the point of view of the wolf. That is, she would play the devil’s advocate and relate to us what flaws she saw in our precautions.

As always, we took dinner on gold-rimmed Raynaud Limoges china, using sterling-silver flatware by Buccellati.

In spite of what the table setting suggests, my parents are not wealthy, just securely middle class. Although my father makes a fine salary as a pastry chef, stock options and corporate jets don’t come with his position.

My mother earns a modest income working part-time from home, painting pet portraits on commission: mostly cats and dogs, but also rabbits, parakeets, and once a milk snake that came to pose and didn’t want to leave.

Their small Victorian house would be called humble if it weren’t so cozy that it feels sumptuous. The ceilings are not high and the proportions of the rooms are not grand, but they have been furnished with great care and with an eye to comfort.

You can’t blame Earl for taking refuge behind the living-room sofa, under the claw-foot tub in the upstairs bath, in a clothes hamper, in the pantry potato basket, and elsewhere during the three interesting weeks that he adopted us. Earl was the milk snake, and the home from which he’d come was a sterile place with stainless-steel-and-black-leather furniture, abstract art, and cactuses for houseplants.

Of all the charming corners in this small house where you might read a book, listen to music, or gaze out a many-paned window at a bejeweled winter day, none is as welcoming as the dining room. This is because to the Tock family, food—and the conviviality that marks our every meal—is the hub that turns the spokes that spin the wheel of life.

Therefore, the luxury of Limoges and Buccellati.

Considering that we are incapable of pulling up a chair to any dinner with less than five courses and that we regard the first four, in which we fully indulge, as mere preparation for the fifth, it is miraculous that none of us is overweight.

Dad once discovered that his best wool suit had grown tight in the waist. He merely skipped lunch three days, and the pants were then loose on him.

Mom’s caffeine tolerance is not the most significant curiosity regarding our unusual relationship to food. Both sides of the family, the Tock side and the Greenwich side (Greenwich being my mother’s maiden name), have metabolisms as efficient as that of a hummingbird, a creature which can eat three times its body weight each day and remain light enough to fly.

Mom once suggested that she and my father had been instantly attracted to each other in part because of a subliminal perception that they were metabolic royalty.

The dining room features a coffered mahogany ceiling, mahogany wainscoting, and a mahogany floor. Silk moiré walls and a Persian carpet soften all the wood.

There is a blown-glass chandelier with pendant crystals, but dinner is always served by candlelight.

On this special night in September of 1994, the candles were numerous and squat, set in small but not shallow cut-crystal bowls, some clear and others ruby-red, which fractured the light into soft prismatic patterns on the linen tablecloth, on the walls, and on our faces. Candles were placed not only on the table but also on the sideboards.

Had you glanced in through a window, you might have thought not that we were at dinner but that we were conducting a séance, with food provided to keep us entertained until at last the ghosts showed up.

Although my parents had prepared my favorite dishes, I tried not to think of it as the condemned man’s last meal.

Five properly presented courses cannot be eaten on the same schedule as a McDonald’s Happy Meal, especially not with carefully chosen wines. We were prepared for a long evening together.

Dad is the head pastry chef for the world-famous Snow Village Resort, a position he inherited from his father, Josef. Because all breads and pastries must be fresh each day, he goes to work at one o’clock in the morning at least five and often six days a week. By eight, with the baking for the entire day complete, he comes home for breakfast with Mom, then sleeps until three in the afternoon.

That September, I also worked those hours because I had been an apprentice baker for two years at the same resort. The Tock family believes in nepotism.

Dad says it’s not really nepotism if your talent is real. Give me a good oven, and I am a wicked competitor.

Funny, but I am never clumsy in a kitchen. When baking, I am Gene Kelly, I am Fred Astaire, I am grace personified.

Dad would be going from our late dinner to work, but I would not. In preparation for the first of the five days in Grandpa Josef’s prediction, I had taken a week’s vacation.

Our starter course was
sou bourek
, an Armenian dish. Numerous paper-thin layers of pasta are separated by equally thin layers of butter and cheese, finished with a golden crust.

I still lived with my folks in those days, so Dad said, “You should stay home from midnight to midnight. Hide out. Nap, read, watch a little TV.”

“Then what’ll happen,” Grandma Rowena imagined, “is that he’ll fall down the stairs and break his neck.”

“Don’t use the stairs,” Mom advised. “Stay in your room, honey. I can bring your meals to you.”

“So then the house will burn down,” Rowena said.

“Now, Weena, the house won’t burn down,” Dad assured her. “The electrical wiring is sound, the furnace is brand new, both fireplace chimneys were recently cleaned, there’s a grounded lightning rod on the roof, and Jimmy doesn’t play with matches.”

Rowena was seventy-seven in 1994, twenty-four years a widow and past her grief, a happy woman but opinionated. She’d been asked to play the devil’s advocate, and she was adamant in her role.

“If not a fire, then a gas explosion,” she declared.

“Gee, I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the house,” I said.

“Weena,” Dad reasoned, “there hasn’t been a house-destroying gas explosion in the entire history of Snow Village.”

“So an airliner will crash into the place.”

“Oh, and that happens weekly around here,” my father said.

“There’s a first time for everything,” Rowena asserted.

“If there’s a first time for an airliner to crash into our house, then there’s a first time for vampires to move in next door, but I’m not going to start wearing a garlic necklace.”

“If not an airliner, one of those Federal Express planes full of packages,” Rowena said.

Dad gaped at her, shook his head. “Federal Express.”

Mom interpreted: “What Mother means is that surely if fate has something planned for our Jimmy, he can’t hide from it. Fate is fate. It’ll find him.”

“Maybe a United Parcel Service plane,” said Rowena.

Over steaming bowls of pureed cauliflower soup enlivened with white beans and tarragon, we agreed that the wisest course for me would be to proceed as I would on any ordinary day off work—though always with caution.

“On the other hand,” Grandma Rowena said, “caution could get him killed.”

“Now, Weena, how could
caution
get a person killed?” my father wondered.

Grandma finished a spoonful of soup and smacked her lips as she had never done until she had turned seventy-five, two years previously. She smacked them with relish, repeatedly.

Halfway between her seventh and eighth decades, she had decided that longevity had earned her the right to indulge in certain small pleasures she had never previously allowed herself. These were pretty much limited to smacking her lips, blowing her nose as noisily as she wished (though never at the table), and leaving her spoon and/or fork turned useful side up on the plate at the end of each course, instead of useful side down as her mother, a true Victorian and a stickler for etiquette, had instructed her always to do in order properly to indicate that she had finished.

She smacked her lips again and explained why caution could be dangerous: “Say Jimmy’s going to cross the street, but he worries that a bus might hit him—”

“Or a garbage truck,” Mom suggested. “Those great lumbering things on these hilly streets—why, if the brakes let go, what’s to stop them? They’d go right
through
a house.”

“Bus, garbage truck, might even be a speeding hearse,” Grandma allowed.

“What reason would a hearse have to speed?” Dad asked.

“Speeding or not, if it
was
a hearse,” said Grandma, “wouldn’t that be ironic—run down by a hearse? God knows, life is often ironic in a way it’s never shown on television.”

“The viewing public could never handle it,” Mom said. “Their capacity for genuine irony is exhausted halfway through an episode of
Murder, She Wrote.
”

“What passes for irony on TV these days,” my dad noted, “is just poor plotting.”

I said, “I’m less spooked by garbage trucks than by those huge concrete mixers they drive to construction sites. I’m always sure the part that revolves is suddenly going to work loose of the truck, roll down the street, and flatten me.”

“All right,” Grandma Rowena said, “so it’s a concrete mixer Jimmy’s afraid of meeting up with.”

“Not afraid exactly,” I said. “Just leery.”

“So he stands on the sidewalk, looks left, then looks right, then looks left again, being cautious, taking his time—and because he delays there on the curb too long, he’s hit by a falling safe.”

In the interest of a healthy debate, my father was willing to entertain some rather exotic speculations, but this stretched his patience too far. “A falling safe? Where would it fall
from
?”

“From a tall building, of course,” Grandma said.

“There aren’t any tall buildings in Snow Village,” Dad gently protested.

“Rudy, dear,” Mom said, “I think you’re forgetting the Alpine Hotel.”

“That’s only four stories.”

“A safe dropped four stories would obliterate Jimmy,” Grandma insisted. To me, in a concerned tone, she said, “I’m sorry. Is this upsetting you, sweetheart?”

“Not at all, Grandma.”

“It’s the simple truth, I’m afraid.”

“I know, Grandma.”

“It would obliterate you.”

“Totally,” I agreed.

“But it’s such a final word—
obliterate.
”

“It sure does focus the mind.”

“I should’ve thought before I spoke. I should’ve said
crushed.
”

In lambent red candlelight, Weena had a Mona Lisa smile.

I reached across the table and patted her hand.

Being a pastry chef, required to mix many ingredients in precise measure, my father has a greater respect for mathematics and reason than do my mother and grandmother, who are more artistic in their temperaments and less slavishly devoted to logic than he is. “Why,” he asked, “would anyone raise a safe to the top of the Alpine Hotel?”

“Well, of course, to keep their valuables in,” said Grandma.

“Whose valuables?”

“The hotel’s valuables.”

Although Dad never triumphs in exchanges of this nature, he always remains hopeful that if only he persists, reason will prevail.

“Why,” he asked, “wouldn’t they put a big heavy safe on the ground floor? Why go to all the trouble of craning it to the roof?”

My mother said, “Because no doubt their valuables were on the top floor.”

In moments like these, I have never been quite sure if Mom shares more than a little of Weena’s cockeyed perspective on the world or if she’s playing with my father.

Her face is guileless. Her eyes are never evasive, and always limpid. She is by nature a straightforward woman. Her emotions are too clear for misinterpretation, and her intentions are never ambiguous.

Yet as Dad says, for a person so admirably open and direct by nature, she can turn inscrutable when it tickles her to, just as easily as throwing a light switch.

That’s one of the things he loves about her.

Our conversation continued through an endive salad with pears, walnuts, and crumbled blue cheese, followed by filet mignon on a bed of potato-and-onion pancakes, with asparagus on the side.

Before Dad got up to roll the dessert cart in from the kitchen, we had agreed that, for the momentous day ahead, I should keep to my usual vacation routine. With caution. But not too much caution.

Midnight arrived.

September 15 began.

Nothing happened right away.

“Maybe nothing will,” Mom said.

“Something will,” Grandma disagreed, and smacked her lips. “Something will.”

If I had not been obliterated or even badly crushed by nine o’clock the next evening, we would meet here for dinner again. Together, we would break bread while remaining alert for the whiff of natural gas and the drone of a descending airliner.

Now, after demidessert, followed by a full dessert, followed by petits fours, all accompanied by oceans of coffee, Dad went off to work, and I helped with the kitchen cleanup.

Then at one-thirty in the morning, I retired to the living room to read a new book for which I had high expectations. I have a great fondness for murder mysteries.

On the first page, a victim was found chopped up and packed in a trunk. His name was Jim.

I put that book aside, selected another from the stack on the coffee table, and returned to my armchair.

A beautiful dead blonde stared from the book jacket, strangled with an antique Japanese obi knotted colorfully around her throat.

The first victim was named Delores. With a sigh of contentment, I settled down in my chair.

Grandma sat on the sofa, busy with a needlepoint pillow. She had been a master of decorative stitching since her teenage years.

Since she had moved in with Mom and Dad almost two decades ago, she had kept baker’s hours, sewing elaborate patterns through the night. My mother and I kept that schedule, too. Mom had home-schooled me because our family lived by night.