My mother said that “unveilings” weren’t part of official Jewish tradition. People chose to have ceremonies for unveiling tombstones more as a matter of comfort. There was no Jewish law about it. But it’s now more than a year after my mother has died and my father wants an unveiling. I’ve never been to one before, but from what I can tell it won’t have the pain or the chaos of the funeral, so I go up to Andover by myself and leave Roy with the kids.
By chance the manuscript I’ve taken with me to read on the plane is about the state of ecstasy. I fixate on a passage that says it is possible for a very anxious person who is unaccustomed to experiencing real happiness to be so overwhelmed when they encounter it, that they can die. It says that statistically an inordinate number of Japanese businessmen die of heart attacks while vacationing—where else but in the Great Barrier Reef! They leave the tension of their everyday lives, and without this structure, in a relaxed state they actually expire. Maybe this is my answer. Maybe my mother’s death was a matter of her being taken off guard by being happy. Maybe it wasn’t fear or anxiety, but happiness that took her life away. If she had that much happiness in her, in the beauty of the faraway Australian water, then maybe I could be happy, too.
It turns out that my mother knew her Jewish traditions well. My father, Ted, Janet, and I watch as the gravestone is unveiled by the rabbi. It’s not especially emotional. The rabbi says a few prayers, officially joining my mother’s grave with the others in the cemetery. On the way out, we pass the other plots. The rabbi gossips with us about some of the other, more colorful recent deaths of the congregants, one even involving adultery and murder. My mother’s death, it occurs to me, has a story attached to it, too, one that can now be added to the others.
I’m starting to see my mother from the outside. Maybe that’s what unveilings are for, to veer away from the ongoing rending of emotions, to situate the death as part of life. My mother had never done that with death. For my mother, who had absorbed so much fatality, death itself had remained an open, unresolved chapter that just kept on resurfacing and causing more injuries along the way. Maybe this was something I could do for her now, or more significantly something I could do for the future of my family, to make the deaths part of the material of life.
I can tell by the way Roy answers that it’s his mother. At first, I figure she must be calling to wish me a happy birthday, although she’s usually the first birthday call of the day, and now that I think of it, it’s strange that she’d be a day late. But Roy’s eyes are watery when he hangs up the phone. “It’s bad,” he says. “Gloria has cancer.” We walk toward the bedroom, so the kids won’t hear. “It’s already spread from her colon to her lungs.” He starts to cry, and I put my arm around him, but he pushes me away. He’s too shocked for consolation.
“How long does she have? Did she say?” I ask.
“Maybe less than a year,” Roy answers.
It’s only been a few months more than a year since my mother died, and we now have Gloria’s death in front of us. But this death will be different, because we know about it ahead of time. Even though the specter of Gloria’s cancer isn’t always overt, we now live with another layer of anticipation.
Roy won’t be spending much time with me and the kids on Deer Isle this year, because Gloria’s chemo treatments are scheduled to begin in August. He wants to be near home. And also his job at the university is getting tense, so he’s more uneasy than usual about being away.
It’s a break to get to Deer Isle again, to get away from our New York trappings. Even though Roy’s not around much and even though the regular babysitter decides to leave early for college and I’m mostly on my own to balance Eli and Eva, and camp and swimming, and the residual office details, still it’s a break to get to Deer Isle again. I feel remarkably grounded this August, like I know the turf.
“Old MacDonald had a farm . . .” Eva sings every verse of the song, imitating every animal sound with relish. She has just turned three and whenever we get into the car, she taunts Eli with her singing from the moment I buckle her into her car seat. “Stop!” screams Eli, who is driven to tears by Eva’s singing. I can’t tell if it’s intentional, but she succeeds in sparking Eli off, and the effect is maddening.
The one thing they unite on is pooping and peeing, which they seem to do constantly. “I have to go to the bathroom!” one or the other calls out from the back seat just after we’ve driven about a mile. “Me, too!” the other chimes in. I’ve taken to traveling with a roll of toilet paper wherever we go. I get to know every public outhouse and supermarket bathroom in the vicinity. When we are outside, together they scamper around to pick out a rock to pee on at the beach, or a bush to kneel behind.
Roy comes for a short one-week visit, and he brings the distress of New York and of Gloria with him. Our different approaches to dealing with death and illness grate against each other.
“Did Leon ask the doctor what the side effects of Gloria’s chemo will be?” I ask. “And what happens if this course of treatment doesn’t work?”
“Leon’s waiting for the doctor to tell him.” Roy’s tone is slightly aggravated.
“But don’t they want to know what to expect? Or if there are other options?”
Roy’s family doesn’t ask a lot of questions. They accept that the doctor will know best. It’s a mindset that’s hard for me to accept; I want to shake them into action. But this is Roy’s upbringing, and he understands the temperament.
Other than Roy, his whole family now lives in New Jersey. It’s as if they’ve just drifted to the location, not like they really belong there. For all of Roy’s childhood they’d lived in Long Island. Growing up they’d visited their cousins who lived on the Jersey shore. And a couple of times they’d rented a house there for a week or two in the summer. But other than that it wasn’t clear why they decided to pick up and move there. When Leon retired from the insurance business and they moved to the Jersey shore, Gloria and Leon left their tight circle of life-long friends in Long Island, to live in a town an hour and a half away. Later Roy’s brothers followed them. His younger brother left his Manhattan apartment and moved to a town right next to his parents. And eventually his older brother moved back from California with his family and bought a home in another New Jersey suburb. When Roy and I first met and I asked him about his parents, he told me they lived “somewhere in New Jersey,” but couldn’t remember the name of the town. That had impressed me, that he could be detached like that, but still care about them.
Gloria and Leon don’t even like the beach. When we visited them in New Jersey, on days when it was warm, they could sometimes be convinced to take a walk on the boardwalk. But if I suggested that we walk in the sand by the water, or maybe take a towel in case we wanted to swim, they’d grimace. “The sand is dirty,” Leon would say. “And uncomfortable,” Gloria would agree. And mostly we’d just stay inside with the too-cold air conditioning on, or sometimes take a stroll in the neighborhood and pass the time talking about which houses were for sale.
I wonder what they really think of me, of my family who yelled at each other at the dinner table, of my brother who committed suicide, of my father who changed jobs every few years when he could no longer see eye to eye with his bosses and then dragged the whole family along with him from state to state. And what they really thought of my mother who was so tied to her Hebrew school. If there’s one thing Roy’s family has a strong opinion about, it’s organized religion. They’re adamantly opposed to it, the whole family. They celebrate Passover on the closest Saturday to the date, to make it more convenient. On Rosh Hashanah, Gloria once said to me, “Why aren’t people going to work today anyway?” acting like she didn’t know. I’m pretty sure she did know and was trying to make a statement, but it was hard to read exactly what she meant. Roy’s family can be needling that way, not always direct.
Outwardly there’s a link between Roy’s parents and mine, and they all seemed to appreciate that. They all grew up in New York City. Gloria, Leon, and my father all went to City College at around the same time. Leon and my father even discovered a mutual acquaintance from their days at Bronx Science and Townsend Harris high schools. But really the sensibilities of the families are far apart.
At Roy’s family gatherings, the television is always on, the predominantly male household absorbed in football or baseball or whatever sport is in season, a far cry from my mostly nonathletic family. Around the table, there’s a lot of sarcastic joke telling that makes me feel quiet. Sometimes they misread something I’ve said, and laugh like I’d meant it to be comical or cynical, even though that’s not my intent at all.
When Roy first introduced me to his family, he thought Gloria and I would unite in our common interest in books. Gloria used to work in a bookstore, and a lot of times she’ll recommend a novel she’s just finished, or ask me about a new book she’s heard of and whether it’s causing a stir in the publishing business. But even reading is something we seem to do differently. Gloria can easily read two or three books a week, happy to escape into a different world. I, despite my profession, read slowly, less willing to allow myself to be transported to a fictional place, more likely to be driven by the emotion of the writing. Gloria could never be the replacement for the missing parts of my own mother. As much as I declared my dissimilarities with the mother who gave birth to me, she recognized when I was really sad or upset, even if she was the cause of it. And I could always get her to go for a walk with me on the beach. I might prefer her to be different, but I could not replace her.
I met Roy eight years ago when we were set up on a blind date arranged by Roy’s cousin and a mutual friend. I was skeptical, but figured it would at least be a half-hearted attempt to get away from my sort-of boyfriend, who was seeing someone else at the same time and who was never going to add up to a meaningful relationship. When I first heard Roy’s Long Island accent (which he still denies having) on the phone, my doubts continued. Besides that, he was Jewish and a lawyer, which would be much too high on the list of my mother’s approved criteria.
“I’m not saying he’ll be the father of your children,” my friend who set us up said. “Just have dinner. I’m sure you’ll like each other enough for that.” The dinner happened, and Roy was kind, and confident. “May I?” he asked without question, as he took the bill to pay it. There was not a hint of the second-guessing that I’d experienced on countless other first dates.
Maybe I was at last ready to stop resisting what might be comfortable. Maybe my preconceived idea of romance that seemed to require drama and gloom was ready to be shed. When I considered it, I realized that Danny had been dead now for nearly ten years. Whomever I met from hereon in would never know Danny, and the passage of time would make it so that they wouldn’t even really know him through me. Maybe I could take an unfamiliar step into the world that was in front of me. Roy was self-assured and thoughtful, and I was willing to find out more.
My father has begun talking more about Judith Taylor. Ted and I already knew that he was never at home on weekends when we tried to call him. But finally he’s given us her phone number. “If you need to reach me and I’m not home,” he says. “I might be at Judith’s.” That was a big breakthrough.
Sometimes he would mention that he and Judith had given a dinner party, or attended the bar mitzvah of Judith’s cousin’s son, or even gone to a concert at Tanglewood together. But if I asked whether Judith might want to join him and come up to Maine, or maybe come with him to New York on his next visit, he’d say, “No. It’s not like that.”
The biggest issue that my father seemed to have with Judith was that she didn’t like to travel. “Not like your mother,” he’d say. “Your mother was always game for adventure.” It was true that my parents had traveled together—they had skied out West, and hiked in the Dolomites, and there had been trips to France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, and of course, there had been three visits to Israel. And finally there was the trip to New Zealand and Australia. But my father was romanticizing. My mother was not adventurous, and I doubted she would have gone on most of those trips if he hadn’t pushed her. What motivated my mother was that she belonged to what appeared to be a well-functioning family, and travel might have been part of that. So was skiing and tennis. My mother conceded that she’d nearly failed gym class in school, but after decades of practice, she’d become a reasonable tennis player and her serve went forcefully over the net, even if it still looked pretty spastic. Skiing was a particularly unlikely feat for my mother, but with sheer determination she succeeded. Intrepidly she graduated from the bunny slopes to the intermediate trails at that top of the mountain. And our traditional Christmas trip came to be skiing in Vermont.
After my mother died, my father continued his travels on his own. Last winter he went skiing in Vail with a neighbor. This year he’s planning another trip to the Austrian Alps with an elderhostel group. Had it not been for the diagnosis of prostate cancer a few months ago, he’d right now be bicycling in Vermont.
The prostate cancer appeared almost exactly a year after my mother died, as if waiting for my father to be galvanized enough to manage it. He said he didn’t need my help or Ted’s. He could handle driving into Boston for the radiation treatments without us. “I’m fine,” my father said. He’d already asked for a few days off from his consulting job. “It’s an easy drive to Mass General and back. I can make it in thirty minutes each way, as long as I don’t schedule the treatments for rush hour.”
Real recovery, though, required time, and care. And that was when he started admitting Judith into his life. He moved into her house for a couple of weeks and let her tend to him. The relationship made sense. They came from the same Jewish community. Their spouses had died within the same month. And Judith even bore a slight physical resemblance to my mother, although she was gentler and kinder.
My father brings up his worries about the grandchildren. “I think it will confuse them,” he says, “to meet Judith.” More than that, I think he feels guilty that the grandchildren will forget their grandmother altogether, and he probably worries about forsaking Ted and me, too, by letting Judith in. To me, it always seemed that my parents’ marriage lacked a sense of ease of companionship that I thought marriage was supposed to have. But still my father has a keen sense of duty about being married, to my mother that is.
“Eva and Eli would love to meet Judith,” I encourage him. The fact is that Eva needed a photograph to even know who Grandma Lois was. And Eli hadn’t mentioned her name in months. “They’ll have plenty of room for Judith, and will still remember their grandmother,” I say. It was during those weeks after the radiation when my father must have come to understand, maybe for the first time, that a companion like Judith could provide tenderness.
In November, Gloria usually makes a big lunch for all the family birthdays that come in the fall. But this year we have the celebration in our apartment instead. Roy plans the menu, choosing special dishes that he thinks his family will appreciate—macaroni and cheese, and roast pork. I gather recipes from my friend Katherine, who’s a great chef—macaroni with three cheeses and red peppers, and a pork casserole baked with lentils in a special clay pot that I borrow from Katherine. Roy watches with annoyance as his family picks at the food I’ve taken so much time to prepare. “Of course they won’t touch the salad,” he whispers to me in the kitchen. “Pickles are the only green vegetable they’ve ever heard of.” They do enjoy the chocolate birthday cake that I’ve covered with thick chocolate frosting and decorated with all their names. “This is really good,” says Leon, “as good as store bought.” He means this as a compliment. Roy tells me that I’m generous to have prepared this party for his family. But I don’t feel generous in the least. I’m incensed as I put the two uneaten pans of macaroni and cheese in the freezer for some other time.
The year is long. We try to visit Gloria and Leon regularly, and it occurs to me that Gloria and I are getting used to each other. New Jersey may be an inexplicable place for them to live, but Gloria takes great pleasure in decorating the living room. She shows me her new purchases from the flea market—a new table, a flowerpot, a small stool with an embroidered cushion on top. She regularly rearranges the furniture, to keep things interesting and alive. And I find myself getting comfortable in their home. Hanging everywhere are tapestries and posters and Japanese prints, which she also regularly rotates. I imagine it must have been a lot like this in Roy’s house growing up. And there are arrangements of dolls made out of yarn, the handiwork of Gloria’s mother, Pauline, whose skill as a milliner is renowned in the family.
Eli and Eva don’t seem to notice that anything is amiss. Gloria’s responded much better than anticipated to the chemo treatments, and after several months, the doctor is now predicting he may still have more than a year of life ahead. And she hasn’t lost her hair yet, although we’re told that it will happen eventually. She still has the energy to have water fights with the kids with balloons and water pistols she’s picked up at a garage sale. And she still sends Leon out to pick up Happy Meals at McDonald’s, knowing it will provoke Roy and me and that the kids will love eating their French fries and slurping the milk shakes.
I notice that Gloria has softened. She’s stopped saying things like, “I’m now a member of the Cancer Society” and making caustic jokes about death like she used to. When my mother died, she and Leon drove all the way to Andover for the funeral, and then turned around and left before the ceremony even happened. She never even witnessed the speeches or crowds or the reverence for my mother. They needed to make it home before dark, she’d later explained, as though this were something I could possibly understand amidst the chaos of my mother’s death. In the past months, Gloria has become yielding toward me. She surprises me one day when she asks me to give her a haircut. I’ve always admired Gloria’s thick, straight, pure white hair, bluntly cut in a straight line a little below her chin. With her hair and her large-framed glasses, she has her own distinct style. When I pick up the scissors I can see that her hair has become straggly, either because she hasn’t had the strength to get it cut like she usually does, or maybe because of the effect of all the chemo and radiation. I try to trim the ends evenly, like they used to be.
Between Roy and me things are getting more brittle. The reality of my mother’s death begins to merge more easily with life, while Gloria’s looms ahead. I recognize Roy’s fastidiousness mounting as things slip further out of his control. Even when it’s hot, he refuses to open the windows more than a slot, saying that’s enough and claiming it’s better for the air circulation. He gets absurdly angry if I’m fifteen minutes late. He’s neither interested nor appreciative when I report on the subway jams I’ve encountered on the way home from work, or about the time it takes to buy the groceries and get dinner on the table, or getting the kids’ lunches packed for school in the morning. I want to fling the windows open and let the air blow in. When I’m driving in the car with just the kids, I blast Beatles music that they now love, and we all sing.
I know I have no right to be angry. He’s worried about Gloria, and his job is really getting to him. The politics have become oppressive, even for Roy who’s usually good at dealing with that type of thing. “Maybe it’s time for a different job,” I say when he tells me about the latest antics of the board members. But we both know that there’s too much to wade through now to attempt any real change. The year drags along, without a clearing in sight.