I heard him taking two steps at a time up to my mom’s room, so I ducked my head under the covers, where I was snuggling with my mother in our usual spot. My mom was the definition of a snuggler, and she always had some form of chocolate close by. A Snickers, or an Almond Joy, or a brownie wrapped in cellophane. Lying in bed with her was like sleeping with cotton candy.
“Where is she?” Chet asked, menacingly, when he bombed through the bedroom door, smelling like the woods. My brother always smelled like a bonfire. He smelled like the beach and the woods all at the same time. He smelled like home.
“She’s not heeere,” my mom sang in the singsong, flirty way she spoke when she was being playful, which was a large percentage of the time.
“I don’t believe you,” he told her and then pinpointed exactly where my feet were, grabbed them, and dragged me out of the bed, until he was holding me upside down by my ankles, with my head an inch above the floor. I used my arms to climb up his legs, and then he spun me around until I was over his shoulders.
“Be careful, Chet,” my mom scolded my brother, which was silly because a) she knew I loved this, and b) my mother telling any of us to be careful didn’t even go in one ear and out the other—it just turned around and went right back into her mouth.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked me, as we bounded down the steps to the kitchen.
It was after ten P.M., and whenever Chet came home from work that late, he wanted cereal. When I was nine years old, preparing cereal felt culinary and also made me feel like I was running a household, which no one else in my family seemed to be doing at that point. I fancied myself a homemaker, taking care of my brood.
Being the youngest of six doesn’t beg a lot of service from your siblings; no one ever asked me for anything—but Chet did. I loved making him cereal when he came home late. I could make any kind of cereal. I knew the right milk-to-cereal ratio he preferred, so I’d fold a paper towel into a napkin (my parents had either never heard about napkins or they were able to buy paper towels cheaper and in bulk), and place a cereal spoon beside the bowl because, unlike anyone else in our family, I knew the difference between a cereal spoon and a teaspoon. (To this day, I always prefer a cereal spoon, even when I’m drinking tea.) Then we’d sit at the kitchen table and talk about our day—like a couple.
My brother Chet was the oldest, then twenty-two, and I was the youngest. I was his little plaything. I knew that the more outrageous I was, the more he would howl, and I loved the feeling of making him howl, with his head thrown back, laughing. Chet was tall and skinny—but strong enough to throw me over his shoulders. I always braced myself when I saw him charge through a room, headed in my direction, with his eyes dancing. I’d try to duck or run, but would freeze in the end, covering my head in my hands, kicking and screaming, only to be thrown up over his shoulders and taken somewhere that I pretended I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go everywhere with him. He could build a shed, he could sail a boat, and he could fix a car—three things my father could never do, but pretended to do frequently.
I would watch Chet and my father in the garage, while Chet would mimic closing the hood of the car on my father’s head or dance around making funny faces at me while my father asked him for some tool that he thought would aid in restarting the engine of whatever outdated jalopy he had his head under. Even as a kid, that felt so silly to watch; sitting there, I was embarrassed for my own father, pretending he could do things that he couldn’t. Chet was an actual engineer, so he understood mechanics, and when my father would eventually throw his hands up, having exhausted all possibilities (known to him), Chet would step in and actually fix the car. Chet was a man the day he was born. My dad seemed like a boy who got big.
They call it a macher in Yiddish. All talk, very little action. My father always made grand sweeping hand gestures when he spoke, which is one of the various bad habits I picked up from him. My brother never moved his hands when he spoke. He didn’t have to.
Most nights, I would fall asleep on the couch in Chet’s room—or I’d pretend to fall asleep, because that’s how I got him to carry me. He’d pick me up off the couch in the same way you’d pick up a handicapped person, and that’s when I felt the warmest feeling in the world—like I was being looked after. I knew in those steps to my room that I was loved. That the man I loved the most loved me right back.
Having an older brother is a lot like a crush—in fact, it is a crush. You have someone you love and adore, who never loses his temper with you, who is always looking out for you and looking after you, and that becomes your definition of what love means.
Maybe I’ve canonized my brother into something much more than he was. Did his smile linger a little longer at me in my memories? Perhaps. But maybe he smiled even more than I’m giving him credit for. Maybe he was even more than I remember. But this is my memory, the one that has been stuck in my head for over thirty years…collecting dust.
One August, we were coming back from Martha’s Vineyard at the end of our summer—a five-hour car ride from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to Livingston, New Jersey. Chet knew how much I loved the cold air, so he wrapped me up in blankets and rolled down the windows, and we drove like that the whole way home, listening to Neil Young. When I’d open my eyes a crack to make sure he wasn’t too cold, he’d shiver dramatically in his flannel shirt and say, “God, this is miserable,” with a huge smirk on his face—or maybe smirk isn’t the right word. It was less than a smile and more than a smirk. It was a grin. Chet always had that grin.
When we finally pulled into our driveway late that night, I wasn’t asleep, but I pretended to be. He carried me up the stairs to my room, singing some silly commercial about a ferryboat in Falmouth, Massachusetts, that was always on the radio. Sail away to Falmouth, / Sail away on the Island Queen…Then he tucked me in bed—wide-awake, with my eyes closed—and turned the fan that was sitting on my nightstand to high. He was the only person in my family who understood that I was born going through menopause, and that whenever I ate soup, I had to take my top off. He always made me feel like precious cargo.
“Why do you want to go hiking? For what?” I wanted to know, through bites of cereal. “Is it because you have a girlfriend?”
“No, it’s not because I have a girlfriend.” My brother crinkled his nose a lot when he was teasing me, and then I’d crinkle my nose back—like we were on the show Bewitched, minus the sound effects.
He told me that he was going to California to rent a car and then drive from there to the Grand Canyon and Zion Canyon, and then on to hike the Grand Tetons.
“You’re going to be on the Vineyard, anyway. You won’t even be here,” he said through bites of my signature dish of Raisin Bran and sliced bananas.
“Why do you have to go?” I asked him. “Why don’t you just come to the Vineyard with us? I don’t want to drive with Mom to the Vineyard.” My mom drove very slowly, hated having the windows open on a freeway, and listened to Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
“I want to drive with you,” I whined.
I was too young to think about anyone else’s interests but my own. Too young to think that maybe he deserved a fucking vacation after graduating from college and looking after our whole family his entire life. Too young to consider what it must have been like to be him and the sense of responsibility he must have felt to all of us—including my parents. Too young to know that people take vacations without their families.
“It’s only two weeks. I’ll be back before you know it, and then I’ll come straight to the Vineyard when I’m back. You won’t even know I’m gone. By the end of the summer, you’ll be wishing I had stayed on vacation because I am going to make sure that every single day we go sailing, you are going to end up in the bay with Bruce.”
I flicked a banana slice off my spoon in his direction.
Bruce was the mechanical shark from the movie Jaws. Parts of Jaws were filmed in Katama Bay in front of our house on Martha’s Vineyard the year I was born. My brothers and sisters believed he still lived in the bay—even though filming had concluded nine years prior.
Sailing with Chet was the best adventure ever. He had a little Sunfish sailboat and would take some of us, or all of us, out on the bay in front of our house, and almost every single time, at some point—you’d never know exactly when—he’d suddenly tip the boat over, and whoever was in the boat ended up in the water screaming. Laughter combined with the terror of bumping into the remains of Bruce.
Then he would tip the boat back on its right side, get himself up, and come lift me out of the water. Then he’d pin me down on the boat and accuse me of tipping over the boat. For some reason, the silliness of this made me laugh even harder, and all my siblings knew that if I was laughing hard, peeing in my pants was right around the corner. That’s when he’d throw me back into the water again. Rinse, cycle, repeat. The thrill was real every time. Danger, but with the cushion of safety. I can still smell the orange life jackets he made us wear, and not because they smelled like urine. They smelled like my brother—salt and wood and beach and home.
“I need a little vacation, Chels. Do you really think I’d leave you with these people?” His nose was crinkling again, and I made a sad face and tried not to cry. My brother was like a father to me, but far less embarrassing. He was handsome and he wasn’t obese. My father wasn’t obese at this point in our lives, but all the signs were pointing in that direction.
My dad was in charge of everything. He ran the show and he was the person who said no to things. My mom said yes to everything. Candy at any time during the day, she didn’t care whether or not you cleaned your room, or what time you went to bed, or if you brushed your teeth—or hair, for that matter. I could have gone to school pantsless if I wanted to—it’s actually surprising I didn’t.
My mom was the one you always wanted to be home. She was fine with whichever way the wind blew. I once walked into our summer house on a rainy day with a six-pack of Heineken that my friend and I stole from her parents’ fridge. “We’re going to try beer,” I told my mom, who just rolled her eyes, and went back to crocheting my father a sweater. I was ten.
My dad was the problem. He was the one we were all scared of. If any of our brothers or sisters wanted anything, it was up to Chet or me to ask. Chet was the oldest, and I was the youngest. We were bookends.
It was around nine P.M. when my sister Simone and I walked into our house on the Vineyard, and as soon as we did, my mother was at the top of the stairs with a face I’d never seen before. She looked distorted. Her face was blotchy and she was leaning on the banister, clutching herself. It looked like she had been attacked.
Simone took what was left of our ice cream cones and headed to the kitchen to toss them into the trash. I stood frozen, looking at my mother, who wasn’t talking, and I was wondering if there was an intruder in the house. And if so, were we supposed to run out of the house to get the police and leave her there? No, we can’t do that. Was he still in the house? What was happening? Why wasn’t anyone saying anything? Seconds felt like minutes.
Simone came back from the kitchen to the bottom of the stairwell, where I was standing, still frozen, and looked at me with dread in her eyes, and then looked up at my mother’s distorted face.
“Your brother’s dead.”
My mom didn’t specify which brother, because she didn’t have to. Simone and I both knew it was Chet. He had gone on a trip and didn’t stay with the family, and now he was gone forever.
Just like that.
You don’t believe these moments when they happen. You believe they have the wrong guy—that it was his friend, it wasn’t him. Your brain is moving so fast thinking of all the things that have changed in just the blink of an eye—what it all means. It means we are five. Not six anymore. It meant our family was broken.
There are only five of us now. That’s not the right number. We need six. Six is our number. We are a team. Now I have a dead brother? What do you mean, “dead”? Is that final?
I ran into the bedroom at the bottom of the stairs and threw myself onto the bed and cried and screamed and wailed in agony. Death is agony. There is simply no other way to describe it. It is getting the wind knocked out of you over and over again, and just when you think you have enough strength to take a deep breath, it knocks you down again. There is no break from the pain. It is arduous, unyielding.
I remember thinking, This is what you’re supposed to do now: Jump onto the bed and bury your face in your tears. Just pretend you’re acting. Do what they do on soap operas.
I didn’t think about my mother or my father or my brothers or my sisters. All I could think about was what he said to me—that he lied to me. My brother left me with the very people he said he wouldn’t. My bookend was gone, and now things were really out of control.
No, no, no. This isn’t happening. It isn’t him. It can’t be. He’s too strong to die. They’re going to find his body and find out it’s someone else’s brother. I got down on my knees and prayed for someone else’s brother to be dead.
“You have to get up. We have to help Mom. You need to come upstairs and be with Mom.” It was Simone. Simone was the oldest girl and Chet was the oldest boy. She had just lost her partner too. That never occurred to me then.
I sat on the bed with my mom as she recounted my father’s phone call from New Jersey. I remember sitting there, wondering if this was what she was going to look like from now on—a foreigner.
She said when my dad called to tell her, she only heard moaning on the other side of the phone. The police had come to my father’s door, and somehow knowing he had a heart condition—he’d had a heart attack a year earlier—they had sat him down before they told him. He couldn’t talk when he called my mom. He just kept moaning into the phone until the police took the phone and told my mother what had happened.
Years later, my sister Shoshanna was telling someone the story of how she found out Chet had died, and it was similar to mine.
“You weren’t there,” I told her. “You weren’t with us.”
“Of course I was there, Chelsea. We were all there together. I came home from babysitting, and you and Simone were upstairs with Mom. Simone went outside while Mom told me because, I guess, she couldn’t bear to hear the news twice.”
I had no recollection of Shana being there that night. I only remember Simone taking me out for ice cream at the Dairy Queen in Edgartown, and bumping into some of her friends at the gas station, and they asked about Chet.
“He’s in Wyoming, hiking. He’ll be back next week.”
The thing I remember most vividly is the ice cream and Simone knowing to throw it away when she saw my mother’s grief-stricken face. She knew before my mother said a word to throw the ice cream away. I remember wanting to ask her why we needed to throw away perfectly good ice cream, but I knew enough not to.
I remember our neighbor coming over with a bottle of red wine, which I remember thinking was inappropriate, because we weren’t celebrating. I remember wondering why all of the sudden we liked our neighbor when all we’d done was talk about what a pain in the ass she was. I didn’t understand why she was at our house, or why my mother who almost never drank alcohol was drinking red wine.
I remember waking up in the morning and thinking that all deaths should happen in the daylight. All bad news should come in the morning. That way, you have the whole day to get used to your new reality, so that the first daylight you see after death doesn’t feel like a plane nosediving into the ocean with the damage becoming worse the deeper into the sea you go. In death, the aftermath is worse than the crash.
My mom packed up our family van, and we got on the very first ferry off the island to Woods Hole and drove the five hours back to New Jersey. No one spoke.
My father and my brother Roy walked out the front door when we pulled into our driveway. Chet’s car was parked on the bottom left-hand side. Roy and my dad were both crying and walking toward us like zombies, with their arms open. I had never seen my father cry before, and I didn’t like it. It was sunny out, which made no sense to me. Birds were chirping. The weather was not commensurate with death.
I wanted everyone to go inside. Not on the lawn. Not like this in front of all the neighbors.
I bypassed all the hugging and went inside to look for Chet. If his car was in the driveway, it meant that he was home. I bet nobody even looked in his room. I walked into his room and could smell him. I looked in his closet and I smelled his flannel shirts. Then I called out his name, but it was like one of those dreams where no sound comes out. This can’t be happening. This can’t happen. Our family can’t take a hit like this.
I remember thinking there was no way my parents had budgeted for a funeral. The domino effect of Chet going off and letting himself die was going to be brutal.
How could he have let this happen?
Then there were the optics. Now everyone would know for sure our family was broken, because now our family really was broken. We were already skating on thin ice because my parents were known to be less than traditional and a little bit too lackadaisical. No other adults or parents seemed to take an interest in getting to know either of my parents, nor did any clear-thinking adult allow their children to spend time at our house, with such a lack of supervision. Now we had a dead brother because my parents let their son go hiking in the Grand Tetons and he had never hiked a mountain like that before. They were unfit, and now there was proof.
There were people in and out of our house all week. We sat shivah, which, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Jewish customs, is a week of mourning for the loss of a loved one—with a lot of deli meat.
People came over with deli platters and all sorts of food—smoked fish, cakes, pies, cookies—everything seemed so unappealing. There was a never-ending supply of corned beef and hot pastrami. Your thoughts become so miscellaneous. I remember looking at all these people I didn’t know who were in our house and trying to figure out the difference between corned beef and pastrami. They both seemed awful.
I remember watching my father collapse on our sofa in front of our bay window, right in front of our next-door neighbors. My father was strong. He was a physically big man. I remember him heaving and sobbing and his shoulders crumpling, and I was desperate for him to stop. What is he doing? I couldn’t understand how he was letting people see him in that condition. I wanted my father to comfort me, but everyone was comforting him. He was emasculating himself. If he was losing it, then whatever we had left as a family was slipping away. We were unmoored.
Even though Chet was the leader of the kids, my dad was the leader of the family. He wore the pants, and you did what he said and he set the tone—and he was foundering. I looked at my dad’s best friend, Jay Gaidemak, and I remember thinking that I wanted him to be my father—maybe because he wasn’t crying. Maybe I was attracted to that. I don’t remember. We are now five, not six. We were over.
I remember our relatives looking with pity at my father. I hated that. They already thought we were misfits or vagabonds, and now this?
I liked attention, but I didn’t like this kind of attention. I didn’t want pity. It was weak. My father was being weak. I remember that the word “professional” kept popping into my brain—my father was being unprofessional. How on earth was I going to be able to restore any dignity to this family I was born into? Now we were outcasts and we were victims. I could deal with being outcasts because I had Chet. He was never an outcast. Everyone loved Chet. My dad was an outcast, and now he was acting like a victim. He was making victims out of all of us. I stared at him hard with my eyes. Stop this. You’re making a spectacle of us.
The subject of buying a family plot came up. My dad wanted to buy other plots next to my brother so that he and my mother could be buried next to him. I remember my parents talking to our rabbi about having an open casket even though my brother’s body had been badly damaged and…something about his chest and forehead being caved in, and Jews didn’t typically have open-casket funerals, but my mother was demanding it.
“He’s my son, and I want to say goodbye to him,” she told the rabbi. I remember these words exactly because I had never seen my mom demand anything from anyone. My father looked at my mother when she said that, and I remember thinking he had never seen her demand anything either. For the first time in my life, in that moment, my mother was more in control than my father.
The rabbi was telling my father that in order to be buried in a Jewish cemetery, my mother would have to convert to Judaism. Wait, what? I thought my mom was Jewish—mostly because no one ever told me she wasn’t. During all of my brothers’ and sisters’ bar and bat mitzvahs, my mother would go up on the bimah and speak Hebrew just like all the other Jewish mothers did during everyone else’s bar and bat mitzvahs. She even went with my father and me to temple some Friday nights.
Apparently, my mother was Mormon, and when she came over from Germany to marry my father, she agreed to raise their children Jewish. I had never heard the word “Mormon” before. I always thought that when my dad called my mom a “shiksa,” he was talking about her being German. I didn’t know that “shiksa” meant a non-Jew. Didn’t your mother have to be Jewish in order for you to be Jewish? Was I not Jewish either? More great news.
There was a funeral, and all I remember were my brothers Glen and Roy taking turns holding me in their laps as we all sat and cried throughout the service. I remember thinking, Why say such a thing if you didn’t mean it? Why not be extra careful when you’re on a fucking mountain peak if you promised your littlest sister that you would spend the rest of the summer tipping her over in a sailboat? Why would you break that promise to her? I was livid.
I remember my German grandfather, Vati, coming over and saying to Roy: “You’re the oldest now. You need to take care of your brothers and sisters.” I remember thinking, Roy isn’t the oldest. There is no oldest anymore. We are a pot without a lid.
They’d had to pump Chet’s body with embalming fluid so that his face could be viewed. He looked dead and bloated. The funeral ended, and I guess at some point we went back to Martha’s Vineyard to finish out our summer? I don’t remember.
The day after the funeral must have been around the time that I stopped crying in front of people. If everyone in my family was going to fall apart—and the only person who held our shit together just let himself go off and die after he promised me that he would come back after his trip—then I would have to be strong on my own.
From that day onward, if I saw my mother crying or heard my parents groaning in anguish in their bedroom in the early hours of the morning, I would leave the house and get on my bike. I would ride my bike for hours and cry, but I would not allow myself to cry in front of anyone else or show any weakness. I would not talk about my brother to my family. If his name came up, I left the room and went for a bike ride. I would ride and ride and cry and cry and then walk back in the front door numb, hoping no one was there. No one being home was better than anyone being home.
At some point on the Vineyard that summer, my mother was standing on the deck looking at the water saying she was just waiting for a dream or a sign that Chet was okay—something from God. She wanted Chet to tell her he was safe and in heaven. She was trying to recruit me. That’s how it felt when she tried to talk to me about Chet. It felt like she was trying to trick me into crying. I walked away from her and told her that there was no God and there was no heaven and out of everyone in the world she should know that by now.
My mother was in pain, and I chose to stab her again. I couldn’t understand anyone else’s pain—I couldn’t even understand my own. I was confused, and I was mad. I remember thinking, If Chet ever comes back, I’m not just going to go back to the way things were before. No, I was going to punish him for what he did.
I remember asking my dad—who would sit for hours on the deck staring at the bay—if he would take me swimming.
My dad taught me how to swim when I was two or three. Whenever he was on the Vineyard—he commuted back and forth to New Jersey in the summer for nonexistent “used-car business”—he would carry me down from the house to the bay and hold me in his arms as he walked us into the water, and then I would swim with him on his back and climb on top of his shoulders and dive over the top of his head. I’d swim back to him holding my breath underwater, until I was right back in his arms. I loved swimming with my dad. After that, he would carry me up the path back to our house and tell me that I was stronger than anyone else he knew and that I’d probably end up competing in the Olympics.
My father didn’t respond the first time, so I asked him a second time.
“We’re not going in the water,” he growled. “How can I go in the water, when my boy is dead?” His face was always contorted back then. Wretched. It hurt to look at both my parents.
I knew it was a risk to defy my father, but I was desperate for him to snap out of it. There was absolutely no light in him, and it was sucking the life out of what was left of the rest of us.
If I could just get him into the water, I knew he would relax a little or find a little ray of sunshine, or at least I could hold on to his back and then trick him into a hug. I just wanted him to breathe—I wanted to breathe too. The water was safe, because if I started crying I could just dunk my head and shake it off. If anyone could get him to experience some joy, it would be me.
I turned away from him and defiantly walked down the steps and across the lawn to the path that led down to the water. I never looked back, because I was scared shitless about how he would react to seeing me swim alone. The only rule I had growing up was never to swim alone.
I thought about getting spanked in the water and how funny that would be for both of us, him trying to catch me in the water to spank me. We’d both end up laughing so hard, I’d inevitably pee, and then I’d know my dad was mine. I could always get everyone in my family to laugh. I would just pee in my pants. That got everyone, every time.
When I got down to the water I nervously swam out about twenty yards. When I mustered up the courage, with every kind of fear pulsating through my body for having defied him, I looked back and saw he had gone inside.
I haven’t had a bowl of cereal since that night in the kitchen with my brother. My brothers and sisters continued eating cereal all the time growing up. I didn’t understand that—how they could do something that Chet loved so much, knowing what we knew. I didn’t understand it because I was only able to draw from my own experience and didn’t have the faculties to grasp that their relationships to cereal weren’t as linked to Chet as mine was. That not everyone has your history or your past. That my brothers and sisters had their own memories of Chet, which didn’t involve cereal, or even me. That each person has their own individual memory of the way things happened, and that you can waste so much time being angry at cereal.
I only ate eggs after Chet died. I’ve spent the past thirty-three years looking at cereal with disdain. Cereal was for children. Cereal was for nine-year-olds before they got their hearts broken. Cereal was off-limits.
One day, when I was around fifteen, I went foraging through the attic and found the pictures of my brother, head caved in, crumpled among rocks. I saw the pictures most parents would have made a better effort of hiding. His head, his chest, everything was crushed. Blood splattered the rocks above him. His limp body with his torn flannel shirt and jean shorts.
The mountain rangers and paramedics said he would have died instantly. Lucky for him, I thought, looking at those photos. The rest of our pain was taking forever.