CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Folie à Deux

In the immediate days, weeks, and ultimately months following my grandmother’s death, my father continued the protest he’d begun in his coffin-side wail by refusing to reconcile himself to the loss. He could not carry on without Rebecca, he said. He would not live without her. Every day he survived widened the distance between them, his surviving her an ongoing act of desertion. Every day he said screw Nature by refusing to concede to her death.

This required that he emulate her inanimate state, with the help of Seconal and Percodan, Butisol Sodium, and Tuinol. Rendering himself unconscious was as close as he could get to suspending time. I shared a similar wish; part of me longed to freeze time so I didn’t have to be a body in sway to its transformative forces, so that I did not have to grow up and age and die, so that I would not lose any more people I loved. Another part of me dueled with this impulse, propelling me forward into the future and growing up.

When Ira was awake, he refused to shower, shave, or get dressed. He halted all semblance of work, scarcely venturing into the office. He gave up eating big meals and regressed into consuming only the soft foods suitable to a toddler’s palate.

My mother tried to explain my father’s behavior to me. “He’s having a breakdown. This isn’t the first time. Rebecca was always the one who could pull him out.”

“How could that be?” I said. “They used to have such terrible, screaming fights.”

“The fights didn’t mean anything. Your father likes to fight, and so did she. She held him together.”

“I thought you were the one who held him together.”

“Nah. I’m a pushover. Her will was as strong as his. Rebecca was the real reason your father was able to make a living and get married and have children. He did it for her. His life could have gone other ways.”

If Ira didn’t get back to work soon, my mother said, the family would not survive financially. He held the agent’s license, and she wasn’t allowed to sell policies. The insurance companies would only deal with a man in charge; we needed him to remain the front person.

My mother had been sitting in the office since 8:00 a.m. She’d pulled her steno chair into the middle of the room, pinned her hair back more severely than usual, put on a fresh coat of bright red lipstick, and dressed in a crisp shirtwaist dress. She’d armored herself for the confrontation. She would put her will where Rebecca’s had been.

At eleven thirty my father hesitated at the doorway of the room, dressed in the same flannel nightshirt he’d worn for days, bits of egg yolk from a week’s worth of breakfasts encrusted down the front of it, crumbs stuck in his coarse, black beard.

“Ira, come in here and get back to work. Just for a few minutes. It will distract you and make you feel better. You’re too turned in on yourself.”

My father shrugged.

“Ira, you’ve got to get a grip on yourself or you’re going to take us all down with you. Is that really what you want, to take your family down?”

Poised in my mother’s lap sat a large leather-bound book labeled M, one volume of her ten alphabetically organized accounting ledgers. These ledger books constituted the most overt symbol of my mother’s attempt to manage our family’s financial life. There might have been chaos all around her, but in these books, in my mother’s even cursive hand, everything would be neatly accounted for.

My father lurked just outside the door.

“C’mon, Ira,” my mother said in her sweetest, most coaxing voice, her lips held tight in self-restraint. It was the voice one might use with a stubborn two-year-old. My father walked a few steps into the room but would not sit down at his desk. He twirled his hair and brooded. Eva returned to her bookkeeping, her lips moving as she performed subvocal mathematical calculations. She could do the most complex computations in her head.

“C’mon, honey. You’ll feel better if you’re productive.”

My father sneered, and my mother’s voice acquired an edge.

“We’re going to go down,” she said. “That is not an idle threat; you are going to take us all down with you. Is that what Rebecca would want? Or would she want you to be a mensch and take care of your family?”

At the mention of his mother’s name, my father advanced farther into the room and began to circle my mother’s chair, his black eyes blazing. “What would Rebecca want? What would Rebecca want? How could you begin to know what Rebecca would want? If I hadn’t listened to all of you, Rebecca would still be here to tell me.” He began to rock back and forth, alternately whimpering, then moaning, wringing his hands.

“Don’t tsitter,” my mother said. “I can’t concentrate when you tsitter like that.” He sat down on the leather couch my mother had bought during the remodel. Ordinarily he would be up and down on the couch all day, and its back had begun to tear, a small tuft of white cotton stuffing protruding from the wear. He picked up one of our three telephones.

I came into the room and sat in the chair at my father’s desk and watched while he dialed a number. The same number he called over and over again. He knew it by heart. We all knew it by heart. Rebecca’s old phone number. The first phone number I’d memorized after our own—our number, Rebecca’s number, Joey’s number. My father held the receiver to his ear pensively. I pictured Rebecca’s old-fashioned phone in its built-in nook in the hallway. A phone from the 1940s with its curvilinear base and heavy handset whose high-pitched, brassy ring jarred and echoed in the hallway the way phones did in ’40s noir thrillers. The receiver weighed on your shoulder; whatever you said on my grandmother’s phone automatically gained significance from the instrument’s physical encumbrance.

In my imagination, the hall was dark and the phone rang and rang, its shrill tone reverberating off the walls. Then I remembered that the phone was gone. The house was no longer hers; it had been sold and emptied of all her belongings. Someone else lived there now. Some stranger’s belongings were in my grandmother’s house. A different phone. Another number.

My father listened as the phone at the other end rang one, two, three times, and then the click of a tape recording came on and a woman’s voice nasally declared, “You have reached a disconnected number.” When he heard the tape, Ira’s face contorted in disbelief and he flung the receiver down and began to make the sounds of weeping. Dry weeping, weeping without tears, with no promise of release. With the receiver open, the harsh recorded proof of my grandmother’s annihilation echoed in the air.

“I can’t believe it,” he sobbed. “No, no, no, my mama can’t really be gone.” He exited the office and crawled back into bed. My mother sat at her desk and continued to do her calculations, her tears dripping onto the ledger’s pages.

Nights, I listened from my own bed as my father paced the bare hardwood floors of our house, from one end to the other and back. I’d sit up in bed and watch him, and when he moved out of sight, I would conjure the rest of the scene in my head. I felt as if my vigilance could protect him, protect me, even though he never knew I was watching. As he walked in his long flannel nightshirt, barefoot, through the length of our house, the floors creaked with the uneven cadence of his limp. First a loud creak, then a slight groan, a beat, and then another lighter creak, punctuated by sighs and groans and whimpers. Tsittering.

He paced the hall in front of my brothers’ and my bedroom, then he went into the kitchen, turned on the lights, turned them off, then on again. Opened the refrigerator, closed it. Flung open each of the kitchen cupboards in turn and rifled through them. What was he looking for? Food, painkillers, stashed sedatives, whatever he could find to quell his agitation. He must have picked up a bottle of bourbon; I heard the cap ring as it fell and twirled on the tile counter. Then I heard him take a swig right out of the bottle, swallow hard, and groan.

From the kitchen my father went into the living room and turned on lights that lit up the hallway and threw shadows into my room. He adjusted the thermostat so that the furnace flared up full blast, and then he stood over the blue flame, where I could see him, hear his muttering echo through the metal grate. Just when it grew so hot in my room that I had to throw off my pink chenille bedspread, he turned the thermostat down.

He approached the front door, parted the drapes roughly over the paned window and turned on the porch light. Giant moths and dragonflies must have swarmed around the sudden illumination. He gripped the nubby green drapes in his hands, peered out between them into the night. Then he began to speak.

“Oh, Mama,” he wailed. “How could I have put you alone into the cold ground?” He sobbed. Heaving, exaggerated, stage sobs. My mother often referred to my father’s emotional outbursts as histrionics. A form of performance. A spell he put himself under that could be broken by a funny line, or my mother’s incredulous expression. In fact, my father had often seemed to regard his own emotions this way too. Pausing in the middle of a display of anger or outrage, anxiety or melancholy, he would stop to take a reading of the audience’s reaction, smile and break character, or wink at me as if to acknowledge my being in on the act. Now in the wake of my grandmother’s death, my father had lost the comic distance that had always saved him.

Who was he performing for now? I wondered. Not for me; he couldn’t have known that I was watching. Framed in the soft light of the living room, my father railed out into the dark night, talking to no one, talking to his dead mother, talking to the God he didn’t believe in.

Other nights I’d be startled from deep sleep by a flashlight shining in my face, and my father’s face peering over me, so close that I could not escape his sour breath.

“Baby, baby, baby,” he’d say. “Are you okay? Are you okay? Tell me you’re still breathing.”

My father wasn’t the only one in our house preoccupied with Rebecca’s death. During the long nights, as he paced the floors, I wasn’t just sitting up in bed so that I could watch him. I was sitting up in bed because I was afraid to lie down and close my eyes. Every time I did, the final image of my grandmother in her casket overtook me. There she was again, in her translucent white veil, and under it, her strangely waxen, powdered skin, and that unnatural smile. I’d linger on her ghoulishly upturned lips and then jump to the terrible moment when they dropped her coffin into the ground. Above all other things, my grandmother loathed dirt. She was forever sweeping it out of her house, taking laxatives and enemas to purge it from her body, and following the rules of kashruth to banish it from her food. Despite all these efforts, she had wound up buried under it. As instructed by the rabbi at her funeral, I’d contributed by throwing a shovelful of it onto her myself. In my fourteen years, I’d encoun tered no sound more awful than that of soil and tiny rocks striking and then rolling off the sides of my grandmother’s coffin.

But no, she wouldn’t look like she had at her funeral anymore, would she? As I mentally followed Rebecca into the ground each night, I could not help but chart her ongoing deterioration. Her body had not escaped time either. Had mud seeped onto her white dress, were bugs eating her flesh, had her skin already rotted off her bones? When my father stood at the window, staring, seeking her in the darkness, could she hear him crying?

“I can’t get Grandma’s dead body out of my mind,” I told my mother one Friday night as we worked in the kitchen together, rolling out dough for biscuits on the pullout wooden cutting board. “I don’t know how to stop seeing it.”

“You’re just being morbid,” my mother said, the implication being that this was a willful act.

“How can I not be morbid?” I said.

“Don’t think morbid thoughts,” she answered. This was an impossible tautology: I was morbid, so I thought morbid thoughts. If I could stop thinking morbid thoughts, then I wouldn’t be morbid.

“The thoughts just come to me,” I said. “How can anyone control their own thoughts?” Could my mother control her thoughts, or did she have no idea of what I was up against because she just didn’t have thoughts like mine? Only my father could understand me. He thought the way I did, but I couldn’t get even the small comfort of sharing my thoughts with him because he was in the midst of a breakdown.

“You can put them out of your mind instead of indulging them.” Indulging? How could she call horrific, unbidden images of my grandmother’s body—which were making me miserable—an indulgence? Didn’t indulgences make you feel good?

She formed her biscuits with a glass turned upside down, each one perfectly round, and then spaced them evenly apart on the cookie sheet.

“What does it mean that she was buried on my birthday?” In my mind, this concurrence of events was an omen whose meaning I could not decipher.

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a coincidence. You’re being superstitious.” The dough stuck to my fingers. My biscuits looked malformed, pathetic next to my mother’s.

“How do you know coincidences are just coincidences? What if they’re really messages? They feel like messages I can’t figure out how to read.”

“Messages? From whom? From God? If there’s a god, do you think he has time to be sending little Debbie Lott messages? Of all the millions of people in the world? We’re not at the center of the universe. If there’s a god, he’s got his hands full with way more important things.”

“If there are no messages, how do we know that anything we do has any meaning? Is it all just random?”

“We make up the meaning, that’s all. We try to be good people. We’re productive. We carry on.”

“Do you think Grandma wants me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“What if she’s lonesome and needs me to be with her? What if she’s mad at me for living when she has to be dead? Daddy said once that the dead envy the living.”

“Your father says a lot of nutty things. Why do you listen to him? Why have you always listened to him? Dead people don’t want anything. They’re gone. When we die, it’s as if we’d never existed.” She clapped her hands together and sent a fine dust of flour into the air. “Gone,” she said. “Poof.” My mother laughed.

Which was scarier? My grandmother vanished into a cloud of flour dust or my grandmother haunting me eternally? The universe loaded with dark messages or the universe devoid of all meaning? I couldn’t pick.

“Why do you and your father always gravitate to the morbid?” she said, opening the hot oven and putting the tray of biscuits in. “Just put it all out of your mind.”

Joey’s family made an easier adjustment. Just as they had converted their Sunday afternoon visits to my grandmother’s house to visits to King Solomon’s nursing home, they now converted those visits to cemetery outings. They got dressed up, left flowers at Rebecca’s grave, read the neighboring tombstones, took home movies, went out to eat afterward.

Uncle Nathan adopted a scraggly stray cat that had shown up on their doorstep. He joked that she was my grandmother reincarnated.

“I recognized her right away,” he said. “A hisser just like Becky.”

Every time Nathan proposed a visit to our house, my father made excuses. He blamed his brother for thwarting his efforts to search out more medical treatment for his mother. I spoke to Joey on the phone nearly every day but was embarrassed to tell him about my new obsessions. I was still mad at him for making me look at Rebecca’s dead body. He felt fine, glad he had said goodbye, and I couldn’t get the image out of my mind.

When I wasn’t fixating on my grandmother’s body, I was thinking about her house. When Uncle Nathan and my father had been cleaning it out, Nathan had asked if I wanted anything of Rebecca’s to remember her by. I thought about the things she’d tried to give me in the rest home and how my father had taken them away. I contemplated what other object of hers I might want. Her lace-up old lady shoes? Her saggy rayon dresses? The yellowed rayon slip that she wore over her small sagging breasts? I pictured those breasts, which I had seen one night accidentally while she’d undressed in our house. In their color and elongated shape they looked a little too much like the way mine were developing. I feared that I had inherited them rather than my mother’s far more desirably ample mammaries.

I’d always admired the multicolored set of coasters that sat on the shelf of Rebecca’s cabinet. Did I really want them? They felt the most neutral of her objects since we’d never used them. Even still, my grandmother’s spirit so imbued her things that I could not imagine them divested of her. She must still be in them, and maybe she could haunt me through them. Maybe they were contaminated with cancer germs. If cancer could be contagious, maybe death could be contagious as well. So I had told my uncle I didn’t want anything, and now I felt remorse. Rebecca had to be as insulted by this rejection as she’d been when I refused to eat her boiled chicken. I’d been so afraid of her haunting me through her things that I’d rejected them, and my rejection only made her angrier, so now she was haunting me as revenge. “I’ll show you for not wanting to be reminded of me,” I imagined her dead self saying.

As my father dissolved under the weight of his refusal to let go, the unwelcome image of my grandmother in her grave began to invade my daylight hours. As that image and my guilt over rejecting her converged, I devised a corrective penitential ritual. I could banish the images of her body from my mind by forcing myself instead to remember every detail about her house and her possessions. Remember this moment; remember this moment, my father had taught me. Maybe I could make time go backward.

In my mind, I would traverse the thirteen hundred square feet of her 1924 Spanish style house over and over again. Walk up the three bright red painted steps to the front door. Open the door, acknowledge its fine cherrywood finish. Take the crystal glass knob in my hand and gently shut the door as I come inside. Enter the living room; remember the intricate, red-and-maroon-patterned Oriental rug. Let my eyes become lost in its maze vines and branches, its swirls that looked like birds’ wings and beckoning fingers. Walk over to the round mahogany table with its scary claw-and-ball feet. Pull on the gold ring in the mouth of the lion’s head to open the drawer. Inside the drawer, just like always: two decks of canasta cards with a faded pink rose design. Walk across the room, remember the polished hardwood floors; remember the mantel with the pictures of the grandchildren. Recreate the exact order of the school pictures: there’s me in fourth grade, looking happy, and then fifth when the enemas started and I butchered my bangs, and Paul in junior high, and Ben’s high school graduation picture. In a larger gold frame, there’s the baby me sitting in a diaper on a rolling lawn of dichondra.

Go to the glass closet, pull on its doors, and feel that little catch at the end as they open. Ah, the nauseating whiff of mothballs. Stroke the soft black sealskin fur of Grandma’s coat. Her lustrous, East Coast-weight coat that she was going to wear when her dead parents came back for her. Maybe she’s with them now.

Go into the kitchen with its black-and-wine-colored, signet-patterned linoleum. Turn the metal handle (notice the drips of paint on it) so that the ironing board comes out of the wall; don’t forget the old-fashioned toaster with the folding sides and the wire frames for the bread. Down the hall to the bedroom of the sex games with Joey, and then that other bedroom, the one that smells of talcum powder and rancid toilet water. No, no, no, still too afraid to go in there. Go into the bathroom instead. There’s Rebecca’s toilet with the S-shaped neck that juts out under its bowl as if her toilet had swallowed a snake. And the bowl’s irregular mineral stain, like a gray moth splattered flat on the porcelain. Listen to the toilet make its hollow ghostly hum. Think about all the bad things that happened in this toilet, that happen in the toilet of my own house every night.

As this ritual overran my life, I became more convinced that my dead grandmother was behind it. Why wouldn’t the dead long for reunion just as the living did? If the power of that longing could deform my father’s life, what could it do to a dead person? In horror movies, being dead brought out the worst in people. What if my dead, zombified grandmother was possessed by all the worst traits she’d manifested in life? What if she was critical, puritanical, unforgiving? What if she hated me for my youth, lack of discipline, messiness, incipient sexuality? What if that bride-ghost-witch wanted to shah still me for good?

Rebecca came to me one afternoon after school during a nap. I was dreaming when I first saw her, a nimbus of fire surrounding her head as she floated behind my bed, dressed in her white burial gown. She held up her hands that glowed with an electrified yellow-white light. As I sat up in bed and opened my eyes, the image remained, and she conveyed her intentions: she wanted to pass death onto my mother, and then through my mother—whose tender touch I would not be able to resist—onto me. I screamed, and the image dissipated.

When my mother and Paul came running into my bedroom, I sobbed.

“Grandma’s ghost came to get me,” I said.

“You were dreaming,” my mother said.

“My eyes were wide open,” I protested.

“Then you were dreaming with your eyes open,” she said.

My father, narcotized by a heavy dose of sleeping pills, never awoke or heard my screams.

“I believe you,” Paul said. “Don’t be afraid, Grandma came to visit me too.”

She had come to him in the stunning black-and-white plaid taffeta dress with the puffy sleeves she’d worn to his Bar Mitzvah party.

“She said, ‘Don’t worry about me, everything here is hunky-dory,’” Paul explained. “Isn’t that just how she would have put it? Hunky-dory? You shouldn’t be frightened of Grandma, she’s with us all the time.”

Paul’s words made me even more hysterical, but he would not stop talking.

“I know, let’s have a séance and try to find out what she wants. We can call in a medium from the Science of Mind church.” Paul had begun to develop an interest in all things metaphysical.

I howled with a whole new level of terror.

My mother shook her head. “Does everyone in this family have to go crazy at once?” she said.