CHAPTER TWELVE

Buffers

As a seventh grader, I struggled to maintain a life beyond my family. Though we both felt like outsiders at school, my best friend Wendy and I had each other.

Saturday afternoon, late summer, 1965. Wendy and I lay on either ends of our living room couch. We’d come in after sunbathing in the backyard, following a fruitless attempt to bring out our natural highlights by squeezing lemon juice on her blonde hair, pouring white vinegar on mine. If we could not get our boobs to grow faster to fill out our bathing suits, at least we could try to control our highlights.

We put a batch of records on the stereo: Herman’s Hermits, Gary Lewis & the Playboys, Lesley Gore. When Peter Noone launched into “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” we felt the beat of the music pool in our bodies and compel us to dance. We did our own interpretations of the Freddie and the Jerk while Paul watched. Then he got out his Polaroid camera, and we began to dance more frenetically, self-consciously striking poses. Paul, already a diarist, a collector, a hoarder of the ever-passing moment, took photos. He held out his wrist, officially timing on his Timex the interminable sixty-second wait for each Polaroid he shot, and then presented us with the images for our judgment. Whether we liked them or not, he would take more.

“I look fat,” Wendy said. “Look at my butt.”

“You look cute,” I said. “Look at my stomach.”

We screamed and made Paul rip the pictures up.

Wendy ran into the bathroom and stuffed her bathing suit top with Kleenex.

“Here, take another one,” Wendy said, sticking out her chest and parading around for Paul. He complied, then laid out the final series on the table so we could scrutinize them as a group.

“Ugh, I look gross in all of them,” Wendy said. “And my Kleenex boobs look fake!”

“No,” I said. “You look soooo cute.”

“Yuck,” she said.

I loved Wendy, everything about her, her blue eyes, her wispy dark blonde hair, her laugh, the way she threw the dice when we played Careers, the jittery pace at which she walked down the bowling lane. She’d hesitate at the end of the lane, throw the ball at a slightly crooked angle, and turn around as if afraid to see what had happened. Then she’d immediately turn half back and peek over her shoulder to see how many pins she’d knocked down. There was the musical tinkle of her charm bracelet as she threw it to the next square when we played hopscotch in the backyard, the adorable way she pushed up her glasses when they slid down her nose. I even loved the tone of her scream.

“No, you look perky,” I said.

“You’re beautiful,” she said. “You just never believe it.”

After all the singles played and we’d danced ourselves into fatigue, we grew more contemplative and put on an album, Richard Chamberlain (TV’s Dr. Kildare) Sings!

“Oh no, not him again,” Paul said, groaning. “That poor guy can’t carry a tune.”

Wendy and I retreated into individual reverie on our separate ends of the sofa. We would take turns with the album cover. I held the wine-colored cover before me and stared at Chamberlain’s handsome face as he sang. Clean-cut, with relatively long hair and compassionate eyes, Chamberlain smiled back. As he made it through “Love Me Tender” in his thin tenor, I rationalized that his weak, cracking voice only made him more appealing, more vulnerable. I pulled the cover closer, and stared right into his eyes. To increase the illusion of the dead image’s vitality, I moved it in even closer, until my eyes blurred. Richard’s face softened. I shut out everything else, and he was right there with me. I fell into a familiar fantasy about the precise moment at which we would meet, and he would see me—not just see me, but see me, recognize in an instant my deepest, truest, most unappreciated self. Though I was more than fifteen years younger than the actor, I knew that my superior intellect and maturity would sway him and that he would recognize our affinity as gentle, sensitive, attuned souls and artists. As with the other “pretty boys” on whom Wendy and I had crushes, it did not even occur to us that Chamberlain might be gay. We just knew that he was sweet and refined, nothing like most of the boys we knew in La Crescenta.

I started to kiss Richard’s photo on the cover, shutting my eyes and trying to feel the sensation of his lips on mine, but could not sustain the illusion. The album jacket had a bitter smell and kept bending in the middle from the pressure.

Paul made kissing sounds from across the room. The fantasy dissolved, and I fell back into my own life. I wasn’t with Richard Chamberlain; I was thirteen and flat-chested, wearing dirty Bermuda shorts, a sweaty T-shirt, with hair that refused to take on natural highlights, and a bowel that didn’t work. I was kissing a piece of cardboard while my brother mocked me. There was nowhere to put all the intensity of my longing.

“Give him to me,” Wendy said, snatching the album cover away. “He’s my pretty boy too.” She threw herself back down on the other end of the sofa and kissed him fervently, twisting the cover from side to side to simulate a man moving his head. She groaned and gyrated. We shrieked and laughed hysterically.

“Take us somewhere, Paul,” I said. “We’re so bored.”

I felt a restlessness, a diffuse yearning for movement, change, escape. Paul would drive us wherever we wanted to go in Montrose or La Crescenta or even farther away, to Glendale, but there was really nowhere for us to go.

After dinner, we hunted down my father who was lying down in the bedroom to help him digest. We prodded him to make up a prompt so we could write funny stories. He’d give us an intriguing line for starters, and then we’d go away and write for ten minutes and return to read our stories to him. Wendy and I sought revenge on the kids at school who shunned us. In our literary parodies we called our neighbor Mrs. Finch, Mrs. Grinch, and her mean son Kyle, Vile.

To try to fool my father, we each incorporated telltale elements of the other’s work, and then swapped stories so that I would read Wendy’s aloud and she mine. We bounded back into the bedroom, where my father had his eyes shut. “We’re ready,” we announced, jumping onto the bed and surrounding him. Wendy read my story with utter conviction. I had begun to read Wendy’s when I heard my father snore. I shook him. “You’re sleeping,” I protested.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m concentrating. Keep reading.”

At the end, we prodded him awake again.

“Whose story was the best?”

“They were both very good,” he said. “Impossible to judge.”

“Who wrote which one?” I asked.

My father could not be fooled. “You were reading Wendy’s,” he said with authority, “and she was reading yours. I can tell because you each have a distinctive style.”

By the spring, Rebecca had become too ill to take care of herself, so my father and Uncle Nathan moved her to a nursing home. Since there were no kosher nursing homes nearby, they put her in King Solomon’s in mid-city, an hour’s drive from our house. Joey and his family visited every Sunday afternoon. Every weekend our family also set out with the intention of paying Grandma a visit. Ben went on his own, playing canasta with Rebecca for hours. The rest of us would get dressed up as though we were going, and then wait while my father procrastinated. He didn’t feel well; he needed to lie down; he had to take some pills. By 4:00 p.m. he would conclude that “Mama will be tired,” and that it was too late to go “all the way into town.”

Based only on Uncle Nathan’s superficial and sunny reports, or on a euphemism-fortified phone call with Rebecca’s nurse Stella, my father could kid himself that Rebecca was getting better, that she had gained some weight or eaten a full meal or taken a walk around the block. Confronted by the actual sight of her, bent over and shrunken to eighty pounds, subdued and too weak to even yell at him, he could not maintain the self-delusion.

It was during the week of Chanukah when we finally found ourselves on the way to King Solomon’s. My mother drove; Paul and I shared the backseat, competing to see who would claim car sickness first. Feeling trapped, my father squirmed in the front passenger seat, ran his hands through his hair, sweated profusely, and jiggled with the controls on the car’s ventilation system.

“It smells stuffy in here,” he said. “I’m not getting any air.” And then, five minutes later, “What do you say we go to a fancy restaurant for dinner after the visit? Five o’clock, she’ll be tired and want to go to bed,” he said. “We could go to Ollie Hammond’s, or maybe Lawry’s. I think I feel like Ollie Hammond’s,” he said. “How about it, Ev?” Appealing to my mother’s maternal instincts, he added, “The kids will be hungry.” Then he turned around to get my support.

“What, you need a reward to spend time with your dying mother?” Eva shot back. Did she want him to do penance for his pro longed absence by eating the rest home’s instant mashed potatoes and canned fruit cocktail on a tray by his mother’s bedside?

As soon as we walked in the front door of the institution, my father made a face of suffocation. “Aaach, it’s really stuffy in here,” he said.

I sniffed the air like a dog beside him. It was hot, and there was a bad smell in the air, something musty, sour. I held my breath.

My father loosened his tie. “It smells like kaacck in here,” he said. “Is everybody in here kaaacking in their pants?”

“Shhhh,” my mother said. “Don’t you think other people can hear you?”

“Don’t you think they know it smells like shit in here?”

“Why do you have to carry on like this?

“I’m not carrying on, I’m just talking. Whenever I talk to you, you say I’m carrying on.”

When my grandmother appeared, coming down the hall from her room, partly hidden in shadow, her rayon dress hanging on her bones, my father whispered, “Oh my God, she’s so gray—the color of cancer. Oy Gevalt, the Malech-Hamovess is hovering over her.”

“Don’t mater,” my mother said, “you’ll upset her.”

Ira and Nathan had made a pact with Rebecca’s doctors not to tell my grandmother she had cancer and was dying. Nathan thought it was for the best, that the word and its stigma would only scare her. When he visited, he kidded her along, bobbing and smiling, and rubbing her head. “Mama, you’re going to get better,” he’d say. “You just need to regain your strength after the surgery. Try to eat. C’mon, take a bite, that’s my good girl.” It was harder for my father to lie, nearly impossible for him not to simply blurt out whatever he was thinking or feeling. How could his mother help him handle the anxiety of losing her if he couldn’t even tell her he was losing her?

As we moved to a sofa in the rest home’s living room, my grandmother tried to sit down next to me. My father forced his body between hers and mine.

“Don’t let her kiss you,” he whispered. Despite the best wisdom of the medical community, according to my father, cancer might well be contagious.

It shocked me to see how much the disease had transformed my grandmother. Her hair, no longer pulled up into a tight bun at her neck, hung loose, like a schoolgirl’s, and was parted in the middle. It looked more black than gray, and I wondered if the same cancer that had taken the color out of her skin had magically turned her hair black again. Rebecca’s demeanor had softened; that day she offered me presents for Chanukah, her own things extracted from her purse: a tortoiseshell comb that folded up into a rhinestone-encrusted case, a jeweled pillbox. “Here,” she said each time, “Debeleh, I want to give you something.”

My father quickly confiscated the gifts out of her hands. “I’ll keep those for her for later,” he said. They might have harbored cancer germs. I would never see them again.

For the holiday, they’d strung the living room walls with faded and forlorn crepe paper decorations decomposing at a rate even faster than the residents. As a crafts project, a few of the patients had also colored in drawings of dreidels and taped them onto the walls. Their failure to color inside the lines suggested how much their hands had trembled. A menorah with six colored candles in it tottered on a low table every time a patient in a wheelchair rode past.

As the late afternoon sun faded, and it was nearly time to light the Chanukah candles, my father urged my mother to sit down at the old upright piano and play. When she lifted its cover, dust flew. Too weak to stand by the piano, my grandmother rested in a chair nearby. The other residents crowded round my mother. One hunchbacked woman muttered to herself and hovered over the keyboard. A fine layer of white hair covered the entire surface of the woman’s face, which she held too close to my mother’s.

As she attempted to play, first striking middle C, my mother recognized that the piano was badly out of tune. Though she had given up playing the piano years before, had sold the upright piano that used to sit in our living room, like her sister Clara, she possessed perfect pitch. Each bad note made her wince in pain, and yet she soldiered on to play Hatikvah from memory. She arched her hands over the keyboard and attacked the keys.

As she played, her eyes seemed to anticipate the notes that rose up in her throat and then traveled into her fingers. When my mother played the piano, she always looked as if she were on the verge of saying something—not just anything, but those words that would finally fully define her.

After the first chorus, my mother began to sing the words in Hebrew, “Kol od balevav p’nimah,” as she played. A few of the residents vacantly sang along, running old tapes in their heads. The hunchbacked woman, fascinated by the movement of shadow and light on the keys, moved in closer, breathing right into my mother’s face. She seemed unaware of the precise connection between the movement and its agent.

Across the room, Rebecca smiled and nodded approval of the song. Anything we could do that was Jewish made her happy.

Only at the very end did my father tell my grandmother what she was suffering from, only at the end did he use the word cancer.

“Ich vais,” she said, “krebs.” She sneered and jerked her hand at the wrist as if swatting away a fly.

“I know, Ira,” she said. “Vus maynstu, ich bin a nar? [What, do you think I’m an idiot?]” She had probably known all along.

On New Year’s Eve day, the hospital called to say that my grandmother had pneumonia and would likely die. Ben went to be with her. My father pleaded for antibiotics, IVs, anything to forestall the inevitable.

“There must be something you can do; she has a few good months left, I know it. Don’t let my mama die,” my father begged the doctor.

“Pneumonia is an old lady’s best friend,” the doctor said, already elderly and worn out himself. “She’s not fighting it. Don’t you.”

New Year’s Eve, all of the adults in the family congregated at the bedside. Joey’s parents brought him over to our house, where Paul served as designated babysitter. With my brother in the next room, Joey and I blew up balloons and took out noisemakers. The confluence of events confused us: were we supposed to be celebrating New Year’s Eve or waiting solemnly for our grandmother to die? In two days, I would turn fourteen. Would we be able to celebrate my birthday at all?

The pending loss felt abstract. I couldn’t imagine a world without Rebecca in it, but when I reached inside for the sorrow I’d seen my parents display, I could not find it. Over the months, I had watched her become more and more diminished, and as she shrunk away from me, from her former self, all I’d felt was fear. And contempt. The contempt of the very young for the elderly. Smug in our youth, Joey and I considered Rebecca a member of another species. It was inconceivable that our nimble young bodies could ever turn into that. We held up our youth as a buffer; her death would have nothing to do with us. Still it did not feel right to be jubilant. We strove for the proper level of reverence as we sat quietly on the sofa eating potato chips and holding hands.

Then Joey had a great idea: I should let him put his hand down my pants, to feel my nascent pubic hair. I could feel his as well. It would be a kind of scientific investigation. Looking was one thing, but weren’t we too old to be touching? And should we be doing this while Grandma lay dying? Wasn’t this exactly the opposite of what Grandma would want us to be doing right now? What would God want? He could make something bad happen. My father repeatedly cautioned us when he saw us snuggling and giggling: “Your children will be morons.” But other times he’d shrug and say, with sophisticated urbanity, “It’s illegal for first cousins to marry in America, but in some other countries, and of course, at other times in human history, it would have been considered perfectly ordinary. If you were members of royalty, no one would bat an eye.” Paul would leer and say, “Incest is best.”

I resisted Joey’s proposition at first and changed the subject, but Joey was persuasive, and I was curious. I knew I would need to touch a man down there eventually, and easing into it with Joey seemed a safe way to start. It wasn’t sex, he wasn’t my boyfriend, we were just cousins exploring our bodies together.

“You can go first,” Joey said. I crept my hand cautiously down his pants. When I felt the demarcating boundary of his pubic hair, much scratchier and curlier than mine, I recoiled, pulling my hand out quickly and then shrieking and laughing.

“Cousin,” I said. “You’ve gotten all fuzzy.”

“Try again,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

On my second foray, I explored a little farther but stopped when I felt the sudden drop-off where his penis began. My father often expressed envy of Nathan’s supposedly enormous schlong, and I feared Joey had inherited it. Wendy said his big hands and big feet were clues.

“I can’t do it, Joey,” I said, screaming and laughing.

“Okay then, it’s my turn,” he said. Ever the bold explorer, he methodically surveyed my entire pudendum, and then gently moving down, stroked the tip of his finger across my clitoris. I felt a rush of pleasure, followed by a shiver of alarm.

“Something wet is coming out of me,” I said. “I’m leaking.” I concluded that Joey must have broken something. My father had always told me I was fragile. God had found a way to punish me. “There’s something wrong,” I said. “You must have hurt me.”

“No, cousin,” Joey said, patting my hand. “Calm down. It’s perfectly natural, you’re just developing.”

Joey explained matter-of-factly that my vagina was lubricating to enable a penis to enter more smoothly.

“For intercourse,” he said.

For intercourse! Horrified, I realized that Joey was right. My vagina was getting wet as one step in a progression that would culminate in what my father called shtupping. This emission was final, climactic proof: what Joey and I were doing was not play or preparation or scientific exploration: it was Sex. How could my body be doing this when I still felt like a child? Why didn’t my body know that I wasn’t ready to have sex, least of all with my cousin Joey?

And all this was happening while my grandmother lay dying.

At 2:00 a.m. my parents came home.

“How’s Grandma?” I asked.

“She’s gone,” my mother said, her eyes filling with tears. Gone? I had the image of her sailing away on a boat alone into the fog. My mother shook her head, and pulled her lips tight to keep from crying. Tears rolled down her ashen face anyway. The following morning my father explained that the strictures of Orthodox Jewish law demanded there be no delay. Rebecca would be buried on January 2, my fourteenth birthday. I said I understood. What I really believed was that God had punished me for fooling around with Joey by killing my grandmother so she would have to be buried on my birthday.

This seemed like more than coincidence. This seemed like some kind of omen. What did it mean? While my parents went to the mortuary to arrange for the funeral, I stared at the one faded sepia-toned photograph on the back of a never-mailed postcard that we had of my grandmother as a child. Except for her nose being sharper and her face more angular, the child Rebecca looked just like the child me. Dark, brooding, Semitic. I stared, as if I could penetrate the surface of the image and gain some important information stored there. Constipated? Yes, she looked constipated even in the photo. Clearly my grandmother hadn’t always been some other species. I was her. She was me. And she was dead.

No, no, no, I put the photo down and rejected the comparison. Eons would pass before I would be an old lady like her. I hadn’t even grown up yet. I would never be an old lady like her. I would escape it. Now was now. I had to stay in now.

A rabbi who barely knew Rebecca conducted the funeral service. Though out of keeping with Jewish practice, at the end my father asked the funeral attendants to open Rebecca’s coffin. There was no way out of the chapel without walking by the open casket. I started to make a plan to avert my eyes and rush out the door. I had never seen anyone dead and didn’t want to start with my grandmother. Joey nudged me forward. He was too curious not to look and didn’t want to look by himself.

“You’ll never forgive yourself,” he urged, “if you don’t tell Grandma goodbye.”

Never?

Joey and I walked up together.

As was the Jewish custom, the coffin was plain pine wood. It was lined with white satin. Rebecca wore a white gown, a veil, and a white satin blindfold over her eyes. “The eyeshades are to protect her from being blinded by the glorious light of God,” my father told me later. She looked like a bride; no one had warned me she would be dressed for a wedding. Under the veil, her face was powdered, waxen. I knew immediately she was dead because her expression was emptied of all its characteristic reticence, her lips curled up in an unambivalent smile and coated with something glossy—was it . . . Vaseline?

I was trembling. Though I’d often dwelled on it, feared it, thought and written and obsessed about it, death had remained an abstraction. Seeing my grandmother in the casket, it suddenly became concrete. Until that moment, I hadn’t grasped what it meant for a person to be dead, this dead, so dead—so remarkably altered. The differences between us that I’d tried to hold up as a buffer dissolved instantaneously. She had been like me, she looked like me, and now she had become this thing—that was it, she had become an object. And I understood in a sick, visceral shock that went from my feet up to my head, and then took up residence in my stomach, that this was my fate as well. I was no different. Someday I would become a thing too.

“Doesn’t she look peaceful?” Joey asked. I wanted to scream and slug him. No, she doesn’t look peaceful. She doesn’t look like she’s in any state of any living being. Can’t you see? She’s dead. Our grandmother is dead. The grandmother who gave us M&M’s and scolded us for saying bad words and gave us dollar bills at Chanukah. She’s dead. Her cheeks, stuffed with something round and hard, were rouged pink. My grandmother did not favor rouge.

And all this was happening . . . on my birthday.

My brain leapt to an instantaneous conclusion: My grandmother looked like a bride; funerals were like weddings; to grow up, to get married, to have children was to die. Each birthday would only bring me closer. I had to stop this snowballing sequence of events from happening to me. No, no, no, I thought, I will never wear a wedding gown. I will never get married or have children. I will remove myself from this terrifying cycle of life and death. I will take myself outside of time and vow to make it all stop.

A few moments later, out on the cemetery grounds, I was entranced by the sound my first high heels made as they clicked across the gravestones. Those were my legs in stockings, and my feet, looking like a woman’s feet, in my shiny new black patent leather pumps.

“Don’t walk on those—there’s dead people under there,” Paul said, yanking me by the elbow off the gravestones.

My father was the last to view my grandmother. Paul and Joey and I were standing outside the chapel, waiting to walk behind the hearse to the graveside, when we heard a howl. At first we couldn’t identify the origin of this unearthly sound. I peered back into the sanctuary and saw my father, his face ghostly white, as white as my dead grandmother’s, keening and wailing over my grandmother’s corpse. Bending low over the casket, he produced a blood-curdling, animal wail. First there were no words, and then, “Mama, no! Mama, no!” My mother struggled to hold him up, as the rabbi gently tried to pry him away so the mortuary attendants could close the coffin.

On the way home in the car, Joey tried to be suitably tragic, singing some of the lines from “Yesterday.” Whenever Joey needed to make sense of what was happening, he turned to the Beatles.

At our house, after the funeral, I watched people gorge themselves on overflowing platters of deli food. The men smelled up our house with cigars. Stella, my grandmother’s private duty nurse from the convalescent hospital, stood in our kitchen in her stocking feet. She was no taller than my grandmother, under five feet, but her body was a solid square mass topped by a head of curly, coal-black hair at the top. She was speaking too loudly in a Bronx accent that I knew Rebecca had found crude.

“Becky was a doll,” she said, “a real doll.”

I hadn’t recognized the archetypal, all-forgiving, self-sacrificing Jewish mother in the rabbi’s eulogy and I didn’t recognize the woman in Stella’s words either. Whatever Rebecca had been, she was no doll. If it wasn’t bad enough that death transformed people, afterward they were lost all over again as others distorted and reshaped their reputations. Was I the only one who remembered the complicated soul my grandmother had been?

My mother opened a box of chocolates someone had brought over. She offered one to Stella, who took the entire box, spread her feet wide, and balanced the chocolates on her lap.

“Becky was no trouble at all to take care of,” she jabbered on, proceeding to stuff her mouth with one after another of the gummy, fruit-jelly-filled chocolates. Her teeth turned raspberry pink. “A sweetie. She was a sweetie. I’ll miss her so much.” She began to cry, chocolaty brown spittle now dripping out the sides of her mouth.

I retreated to the bedroom with Joey and his little brother, Jamie, to play board games. We could reside in our own cocoon, protected from the adult proceedings outside the door. When I lost Careers, I slipped into my closet, shed my clothes, and emerged to dance what I suspected would be my final, commemorative, feather-waving-in-my-hand, finger-atop-my-head, naked Hokey Pokey. Since there was no touching, and Jamie was present, there was no danger of this being sex. Instead this felt like a nostalgic homage to our innocent play of the past. Jamie’s eyes lit up at the sight of my naked body, and he smiled for the first time since the funeral. Yes, what I was doing was courageous, providing my own little USO show for the troops, a needed service to cheer Joey and his brother up after the tragic loss of our grandmother.

It cheered me up too: I wasn’t Rebecca; my body was young, lithe, vital. I was alive and I was sexy and I was dancing.