The Adults (9 page)

“I sure do feel bad for Mark,” I said, folding my hands on my lap. “Don’t you?”

“And poor Mrs. Resnick,” my mother said, flipping down the dashboard mirror. “It’s just awful.”

“Nobody’s pain is worse or better,” my father said, making eye contact with me in the rearview mirror of the car. “Just different.”

This made me so angry because I was sure I had said the perfect thing, something nobody could ever disagree with, and so I stared at all the mailboxes and said, “You know they drain the blood from your heart after you die,” and my mother put her hand on my thigh and said, “Calm down, Emily.”

“If you need to see a therapist, Emily, just tell us,” my father said.

“We should bring the Resnicks a lasagna later this evening,” my mother said, looking at her face in the mirror, and I wondered if she would still be going to the funeral if she knew my father and Mrs. Resnick were lovers, and I felt I should shout it out right there in our car, and I almost opened my mouth to do so but saw her slowly apply lipstick and became afraid that maybe she already did know, that her goodwill toward Mrs. Resnick was something else entirely, something I couldn’t quite understand.

My mother seemed so invested in the idea of Mr. Resnick’s suicide and all the tradition that surrounded death—flowers and lasagna platters and phone calls and jewelry so dull it wouldn’t offend—yet couldn’t bring herself to cry. I had never actually seen my mother cry. She didn’t even shed a tear when her own mother died four years ago. I remembered when she got off the phone with my aunt Lee, my mother sat upright at the dinner table and explained to me and my father: Nana has a blood disease.

We nodded our heads and looked her in the face and thought, Ah yes, blood disease, as she picked up her dull spoon and funneled in the beef stew like the structure of consumption was all she needed.

After that, we spent most of our time at Stamford Hospital. My father and I communicated silently, sitting in the hall, kicking someone else’s French fry between our feet. My mother walked back and forth from tiled places to tiled places. She didn’t get very far, but I could feel her changing with every step. She looked at us. She looked at me especially and said, “I can’t believe this blue room is the room in which my mother will cease to be.”

This was as much a warning as it was a threat.

Then she would say, “Hey, guys”—just like that, like me and my father were a gaggle of something indistinct—“let’s go get some coffee.” I reminded my mother: I am only ten, my legs are barely covered in peach fuzz, I just found out there are two r’s in “library,” this whole time it had never been “ly-bary,” and how embarrassing, I’m so so embarrassed, Mom, can I have a ginger ale instead?

“Of course,” my mother said, and took my hand. My father got on a plane to Munich.

Two weeks later, Nana’s heartbeat was dangerously slow. I sat and crossed my legs and counted my toes as I listened to my mother schedule Nana’s funeral for the next day. Mahogany at eleven, lilies in the afternoon, buried by dusk. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, and I wondered if this was what your heartbeat sounded like as soon as you started to lose it.

“Don’t ask me why,” my mother said to the doctor, “but she wants to have her funeral the day after she dies. This sounds awful, and I can’t believe I’m going to ask, but will my mother be dead by tomorrow?”

Nana wanted to be fresh.

“That’s only when you are Jewish, Mother,” my mother had argued a week earlier.

“And the Jews do it for good reason,” Nana said. “Who wants to smell like an old dead body? I want to be fresh!”

“You won’t smell,” my mother said. “Jesus, let’s not talk about this like that.”

“Gloria, you need to face the facts,” Nana had said. “You know, that has always been your problem.”

Nana was the wisest woman anyone knew. She did the crossword puzzle every day and knew about words my father didn’t. She knew how to keep all of her flowers fully bloomed through October, and whenever I fought with my mother over the last grocery bag in the car, Nana would recite a Bible passage from memory. We’d be silenced by the immediacy of God standing before us in a knit sweater, burgundy heels.

When we were sitting in the hospital cafeteria and my mother dropped her seven-dollar noodles on the floor, she swore loudly and threw her fork.

“Mother,” I said, looking her straight in the eyes,
“your noodles are gone.”

“Emily, for Christ’s sake, don’t be so weird,” my mother said, picking up the noodles with an American flag–imprinted napkin.

Nana was hooked up to ten different tubes regulating ten different parts of her body and insisted the next day was the day she was going to die. She insisted it’s something you can feel inside you, as though your feet have already stopped understanding their responsibility for the toes. If anything, I was comforted by how organized her death was becoming. My mother called my father, who was flying home from Munich for the funeral. He’d try to get there in time. “Damn right, it’s a big ocean,” my mother shouted to him on the black phone at the hospital. I stood next to her in knee socks, a sponge, absorbing her rage. When she hung up, she bit her painted thumbnail and said, “I love your father. I do.”

My mother phoned everyone about the event that was to occur: Nana was due to stop breathing any minute now. Until the nurse told us that Nana’s heartbeat was strong enough to last until the next night. “You mean she’s not going to die tonight?” my mother asked.

“I don’t think so,” the nurse said.

And I really thought this had to be it. This was the moment when my mother would put her face in her hands and cry. But she began to laugh. She was always doing this, being so painfully unpredictable. I stared at her in shock until I realized how funny it was. Nana not dying was the funniest thing that happened all day, maybe our whole lives thus far, and soon we were bent over on our seats from laughing so hard. Sometimes, I loved my mother so much.

Nana died.

I felt so guilty for laughing, I pinched my thighs while I slept. The morning of her funeral, I threw a tantrum outside the shower and shouted to my mother, “Don’t make me go!” My mother plucked me off the floor like an undressed doll that she put in the wrong part of the dollhouse, like I was over in the kitchen holding a plastic egg and she needed me in the bath, like I was a child who did not understand age and location and dress code, and my mother stuck me in the tub as though she could see this about me too, and I remember knowing for certain that oh my god that was my mother holding me naked.

“I don’t want to see her!” I shouted through the plastic curtain.

“Don’t worry, Emily,” my mother said. “You won’t be able to see her.”

This made me even more confused, because why would we be going somewhere just to see Nana if it wasn’t to see Nana, so I sat on the tub floor and shaved the hair off my legs for the first time with my father’s razor. I bled in three places.

I put on thick black stockings as a Band-Aid. The limousine was so big, I remember feeling instantly colder than I should have during March. I remember feeling like we should have had a beverage in our hands, like we should have been going to a party instead. I remember nobody saying anything at all. And this happened so early in the morning, as if the whole point of saying good-bye was to shower first, and the only thing I can distinctly remember being surprised about was that I had to set my alarm the night before like I was an older person waking up for work.

Halfway through Nana’s funeral, I stared at the door hoping my father would walk in and I peed through my dress.

But my father did not show up until after the burial, after the reception, after we had eaten cold eggplant bread and shared nostalgia for her acute criticism, wishing she were there to explain how the meatballs were too damn dry and that nobody in this goddamn country knew how to make anything worth a dime, after all the pots and pans had been scrubbed and put away in the cabinets and the cheese dish grew green fuzz across the top because we forgot it on the piano for two days.

“Dobrý den,”
my father said in Czech, which at the time I thought was German. He was cold in the doorway and reeked of dark, faraway lands.
“Mám tě rád.”

My mother did not even ask him to translate. She just scraped the cheese into the garbage can and went to bed without washing the platter. I wrote
MOM TAY ROD
down in my notebook and asked the German exchange student in my class that everybody called Scheisse—German for “shit”—what it meant in English. The fat life, he said.

“I peed,” I whispered to my mother in the pew. My mother looked at me and her face fell. I was intolerable. I knew it. But she didn’t even admit this, or say, “Now why would you pee in your pants?” or “My God!” She picked me up and put my arms around her neck and carried me to the bathroom and this is what I will remember when I am most scared about being alive, abandoned in a room years later, the heat of her cheek against mine, someone else’s skin around me, mistaking it as my own.

I
t cost ten thousand dollars to take your life in Connecticut, which didn’t surprise me considering Connecticut was the most expensive state to do anything in. Mrs. Trenton announced the total to everybody at the coat rack. She sounded like a bad advertisement. “Ten thousand dollars,” she said. “What a waste . . . you could rent a flat on the Seine with that kind of money . . . go to Budapest for a month . . .”

The rest of the adults were stabbing cheese cubes with toothpicks. It seemed wrong to eat and talk about death, like something my mother would have advised against, similar to eating and running or eating and going to the bathroom or eating and being mean, but there she was by the cheese platter, offering cheddar to a curly-haired man. It was obvious the man wanted to fuck her. Even more obvious that she didn’t mind. The whole performance made me sick, gave me the same feeling I got when Janice brought in tiny tuna sandwiches after she gave a forty-five-minute presentation on the Holocaust last year, complete with photos of corpses and a short slide show of the mass graves at Terezin and then held up a platter and said, “Who wants sandwiches?”

Mr. Resnick’s value suddenly seemed measurable by everybody’s grief, which didn’t seem to be much at all. The adults hardly looked changed, their hair still the same color it was two days ago, as they picked the stems off the strawberries before they ate them. They sat down in red leather recliners, crossed their legs, but most of them never took off their fall coats, perhaps not fully convinced by the warmth of the house or the idea of a suicide in the neighborhood,
this neighborhood
, where it was officially recorded that in September of ’94 there were more tulips than people. I caught my mother bragging about this to our cousin Rex at the town pool once, to which he said, “The parties you must have . . .”

My father shook hands with some white-haired ladies who flittered around the cocktail tables like overdressed children, nodding their heads, and my father nodded back as if to say,
Yes, it’s hard—very hard. Very hard to never see a man you never saw
. They were like kids at the playground, trying to decide whom to play with, and was the conversation worth the fuss? Adults were constantly auditioning, but for what? For the next conversation, for the next conversation, for the next conversation? They touched each other on their sides as they passed, or sometimes pressed a hand to the small of a back to signal they were still in love, still alive, chock full of organs. Everybody wore black, except for the bright blue scarf wrapped so high around Mrs. Bulwark’s neck, she looked like a character from Dr. Seuss if a character from Dr. Seuss ever went to a funeral. I was walking away from one of Mark’s third or fourth cousins, who was trailing behind and informing me how strange Mr. Resnick’s suicide was considering summer suicides generally preferred to go naked. “It’s
October
,” I said back. I ran my hands against the smooth maroon walls, seeking out a crack, searching for Mark, listening to everybody.

The girl hung at the curly-haired man’s knees in a plaid jumper and exclaimed, “This is sooo boring, Dad.”

“Go talk to someone,” the curly-haired man said.

“Talking is boring,” the girl said. “All you people do is talk.”

“If you’re looking for more than that in life, Melissa, you’re going to be disappointed. That’s what we do. We stand around and we talk.”

“Hell,” my mother interjected, with a drunk finger pointing in the air, “we might go to a movie sometime, but you know what we do after it? We sit around and talk about it.”

“Exactly,” the curly-haired man said.

They both sipped on their drinks.

“It’s the permanence that makes the dead beautiful,” the curly-haired man said at some point, as though my mother had asked, which I knew she didn’t since the only possible question that would have preceded such an answer was, What do you think makes the dead so beautiful?

“I wrote my dissertation on it,” the man said, continuing. I had always hated curly-haired men. Sometimes, they looked too much like children who didn’t brush their hair in the morning.

“Well, it’s certainly up for debate,” my mother said, playing with his daughter’s long ponytail, and I could tell even from across the room that was the hair, the daughter, she had always wanted: golden, tame, quiet at her hips. My hair was darkening from a dirty blond to an ashy brown like my father’s, and my mother was so disappointed. Last year, she announced that the “sun had left it,” and my father picked up a chunk as he walked by, rubbed his bald spot, and said, “Why is
my
hair growing out of
your
head?”

My father stood in the hallway with Alfred and a few other tall men I didn’t know. Tall men always seemed to have such purpose, with their heads next to the cabinets and hands in their pockets, so tidy and neat and civilized these men were, even their hands had storage units when they weren’t needed in the conversation. Nothing these men did could be carelessly executed; removing a fallen olive from the floor was an event they seemed to have written into their calendar weeks ago. Their laughter was impossibly loud and soft at the same time, the kind of laughter that could kill you if you weren’t a part of it. Every boom and hush made my heart quake and seemed to kill Mr. Resnick even more, buried him farther into the ground. When they were done laughing, they nodded their heads, passed judgment on the high Gothic ceilings. These were the living men, leaning against walls, sipping on whiskey, being accurate.