The air is dirty and noisy. Eli observes how big the buildings are, and how many people there are, and how many traffic lights. Every year when we return from Maine, we say the same thing. Maybe we should be living in a place where the breezes are fresh, the pace is slower, and where we can spend more time hanging around with our children. But this year it seems like we might really mean it. “Maybe upstate,” Roy says. “We could commute from somewhere near Rhinebeck, and you could have an office at home. Let’s make a trip up there to look at some houses.”
“I’d prefer a life that has nothing to do with the city,” I say. “No commuting, a place near the beach.”
On our way back from dinner, Roy and I see a man get hit by a car. He flies up into the air and then his body thuds to the ground and he lies unconscious on the street. Repelled, and gravitated to the scene at the same time, I wonder if we should call someone. But the sirens are already screeching, the man’s body surrounded by ambulances and curious passersby. The precariousness of our lives is tangible. “Let’s leave,” I say. On our first visit to Gloria and Leon in September, we witness the damage of the past month—the full accumulation of the chemo treatments. Gloria has been transformed into an old, gaunt person, “a cancer patient,” as she says.
“We really have to visit regularly now,” Roy says.
“I know,” I agree. “The kids need to remember their grandmother while they can still play with her.”
“We may not have much time left,” Roy dares to say. But Eli and Eva only see what’s in front of them. They don’t seem to notice that Gloria has changed, even though she now wears a scarf on her head.
Sitting in Gloria and Leon’s living room, my head is fuzzy from that familiar lethargic feeling of sitting around with relatives for too long. The sound of the TV in the background is irksome, especially with the last glow of summer still in the air. But for once, I’ve planned ahead. Before we left I packed a bag with everyone’s bathing suit and a change of clothes.
“Why don’t we go to the beach?” I ask, using an upbeat voice. Even though I know that Gloria and Leon never step foot in the sand, and certainly wouldn’t dream of treading anywhere near the water.
“I don’t know,” Leon replies, “the sand is uncomfortable.”
“The beach?” Gloria sighs. “Wouldn’t it be nicer to stay inside in the air conditioning?”
But I’m determined to fight against the stagnation, the sitting around talking about which houses are for sale in the neighborhood. It’s a beautiful, warm September day, and there won’t be many of these days left. “Come on,” I persevere. “Remember how much Eli and Eva loved playing in that playground on the Bradley Beach boardwalk? Eli could ride with Leon in the Miata,” I think to add. “And the rest of us can drive in our car.”
Roy told me about the Miata just after we met, how he and his brother had bought it for Leon for his sixty-fifth birthday. I’d been impressed by this grand gesture, especially once I met Leon, a man who was far from a roadster and seemed content with his sedentary life. Roy and I borrowed the Miata ourselves a couple of times when we first got together. Once when we drove up to Saratoga with the hood down on an early summer weekend, we ran into an unexpected hail storm and had to quickly bolt the roof back down again. Mostly the car now just sits in the garage, except that Leon gets a thrill out of driving Eli on short rides when we come to visit.
“Let’s drive in the Miata!” shrieks Eli.
It works. Gloria finds a couple of extra towels and carefully folds them into an old beach bag.
Once we get there, Eli prefers to stay at the playground on the boardwalk, not wanting to come down to the beach like I had in mind. But Eva and I continue to the water’s edge. The waves come rippling in and tickle our feet, and in no time we’re playing in the water. Before long, Eli’s grown tired of the jungle gym, and he runs down to the water and jumps in, too. We splash around gleefully, and when I try to come out for a rest Eli and Eva pull me back in again.
All covered in salt water and refreshed, I look out at the horizon. The sun glitters everywhere as it reflects off the water. Gloria and Leon are smiling and nodding in appreciation when we reach them back at the boardwalk. “Careful to get that sand off your feet before you put on your sneakers,” she says to Eli. “Don’t worry,” I say, as I rub the kids’ feet dry and shake out their shoes.
This Rosh Hashanah is still summer-like. And Roy’s friend’s house on Fire Island is empty, so he invites us to take it for the weekend. The kids especially love the hot tub. The thermostat’s broken so it doesn’t get too hot, and they splash around for hours at a time. We walk on the wide, open, beautiful beach, empty and perfectly warm this first weekend in October.
It’s getting to be time to take the ferry back home, but first Roy suggests that we take the bagels that are leftover from breakfast and throw them into the water, to rid ourselves of our sins of the year that is ending. I love the idea of celebrating our own version of the custom of throwing our sins away as we think about the year that’s passed, and I’m surprised that Roy has thought of it. With our bag of bagels in hand, we lean over the edge of the dock. Eva throws her whole bagel into the bay at once, before she notices that the rest of us are breaking off small pieces.
“For everything sad,” I say as I throw a bit of bagel into the water. “And for every time I was angry,” I say, flinging in another small piece.
“For every time I yelled at Mom,” says Roy. “And for every time I yelled at Eli. For every time I yelled at Eva.”
“For every time I was sad,” Eli shouts out. “And angry.”
Eva begs us to give her more pieces, so she can throw them, too. Eventually all of our crumbs are in the water. “Can we get all the bread back now and eat it?” Eva asks. I don’t know if we’ll ever do this again, but we’ve made our own new ritual, and we take the ferry home, feeling complete.
This October 13th is the eighteenth anniversary of Danny’s death. I hadn’t even noticed the date until a friend, whose brother also committed suicide and who always carefully remembers, calls to say she’s thinking of me. On this lovely fall day, I’ve been busily absorbed in trying to sell a manuscript that I’m excited about, and hadn’t been thinking about Danny at all. It’s the first time in eighteen years that I haven’t noticed what day today is.
When Danny was an adorable, rosy-cheeked baby, I loved how he looked in his light yellow pajamas. On weekend mornings a lot of times I’d get into his crib and play with him. Sometimes Teddy would come in, too. But mostly it was my own little home with Danny, my cuddly human doll. I’d comb his soft, reddish hair and arrange it in different styles with my barrettes. As he got a little older, I helped him learn to stand up by grabbing onto the crib bars. On the long afternoons when I didn’t have to go to Boston with my mother to visit Teddy in the hospital, I watched Danny as he learned to crawl and cheered him on when he started walking for the first time by holding onto the furniture.
When I did go with my mother to the hospital to visit Teddy, I couldn’t actually see him, because I was too young. I’d wait for my mother in the big waiting room on the lobby floor around the corner from the elevators. My mother would make sure I had a book to read. But mostly I just waited and concentrated on how to spread out the time. I’d choose just the right moment to go into the gift shop with the nickel my mother had given me to buy a Chunky bar. Then, I’d go back to my chair, unfold the silver wrapper, and nibble the milk chocolate block filled with whole peanuts and raisins as slowly as I could, so the time wouldn’t seem so long.
I liked knowing that I was close to my mother, even if she was upstairs with the sick patients, where I wasn’t allowed to go. And I knew we’d get to drive home together. We’d usually get stuck in rush hour in the big traffic circle in front of the billboard saying, “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now.” “That would be nice, to be home now,” I’d say. And my mother would explain that it was supposed to be an advertisement for an apartment complex.
During those couple of years when Danny was a baby learning to walk and talk, it was like our family had two locations—the hospital and home. Even though there was something comforting about being with my mother and Teddy in the hospital, I liked it better being in the sunroom in Marblehead with Danny, with the babysitter in the other room. When Danny and I were playing together I wasn’t thinking about where we were, or that my mother was somewhere else.
Teddy’s being sick with a rare kidney disease set him apart. I’d make cards for him to read in the hospital because sometimes he’d be there for as long as a month or even two months at a time. Sometimes my father would buy a puzzle or a game for me to send to him. “Why don’t you give your brother this tic-tac-toe board,” my father would say. “Your mother can bring it to him.” Or sometimes he’d help me to make a rebus puzzle to send to Teddy.
Teddy’s life in the hospital was a mystery, but sometimes I’d get stories. Once when it was an unusually beautiful spring day and Teddy was feeling well, my mother told me that she and my grandmother took him for a walk outside in the garden. Teddy was wearing the red corduroy bathrobe my mother had made for him. Usually, my mother told me, he could only see the garden from his window, but on that day he got to go outside. Once he sent home a brown and yellow tile ashtray that he’d made with the “activity lady,” who would come around and play with all the kids who had to stay in their beds. Teddy was part of a special group of children at the hospital who they gave special tests to. They were called “guinea pigs” and he was an especially good “guinea pig.” And there was the famous time when my grandmother was visiting and she went with my mother to see Teddy. She got pushed into the broom closet by the Secret Service, she told us, to make room for President Kennedy, who was in the hospital, too, visiting his newborn baby son Patrick. My grandmother’s story was very exciting, but then the little baby died and they had a funeral, and the president and Jackie were in the newspaper. It was lucky that Teddy lived.
When I was about nine, my mother thought she’d found a serious health matter for me, too. I was recovering from the grippe and standing in a short nightgown in my parents’ bedroom, when my mother noticed that one of my hips looked like it was a little higher than the other. She brought me to the doctor, and sure enough either I had scoliosis or a leg length discrepancy, they weren’t sure which. In a matter of weeks, I was going to Children’s Hospital, too, to get X-rays of my legs and spine. At the hospital, an exercise therapist taught me to do special exercises. I hadn’t yet had my growth spurt, so they weren’t sure of what would happen to me, but I was told that if I didn’t do the exercises every day, I might have to wear a special body brace, or even worse than that—a body cast. In fear, I did the exercises almost every day—leg lifts and standing up pushups with my hands pressed against the corner of two walls. And for the next few years, I’d go to the hospital every six months for X-rays and a check-up. It was determined that I had a “young bone age” and my growth spurt would probably come late, so I had to keep up with the daily exercises.
When we first moved to Connecticut, we’d make occasional trips back to Boston to the hospital for checkups. But eventually we switched to a more convenient hospital in Hartford, where I’d get X-rays and be examined by a different doctor. The new doctor said I’d now need to wear a lift in my shoe, with my ever-approaching growth spurt still to come. My mother brought my shoes to a shoemaker to have the lift put in, like the doctor had instructed. He’d promised me the lift wouldn’t show. But the shoes came back looking ugly, and the lift did show. No one in Boston had ever mentioned anything about special shoes. I refused to wear them and nothing much seemed to go wrong. Later, I discovered that nearly half the population has a leg length discrepancy.
I don’t think my mother ever found a special illness for Danny, although there was once some talk of his having a deviated septum. One thing that made him a little different from the rest of the family, and maybe a little more delicate, was that he was prone to sunburn. Once when he was about six or seven, he went to the beach with a friend and came home with a really bad burn. I covered him with sour cream, having read somewhere that this was a good antidote. Then I sliced some cucumbers and put them on top of the sour cream, thinking they might help to cool him off.
We all adored Danny. We would do anything for him. I remember him wearing his bright blue Captain Kangaroo hat, a small molded plastic version of the one Captain Kangaroo wore on TV. He loved it so much he chewed a hole in it. And he wore it every day, even in the summer when it made his head sweat. One long car trip, probably on the way to New York or Washington, it flew out the window into the middle of the highway. My father actually pulled the car over, and got out and ran along the shoulder of the road, cars rushing by as he tried to catch up with the small blue hat that was blowing backwards. But he couldn’t get it back. It took a while to adjust to seeing Danny’s head without his hat.
Another time, it was a summer evening and it was unusual because we all went out for dinner at a restaurant. We were sitting at a big round table at Doane’s, a seafood place on the water, and we were right in the center of the restaurant. Danny still had to sit on a booster seat, and I remember him happily smiling, perched up higher than the rest of us, like a little king on his throne. My mother helped me and Teddy look at the menu, skipping over all the fried clams and shrimp, which weren’t kosher, until we found the fish & chips and salmon croquettes. Just as the food came, I noticed a yellow pool on the floor around Danny’s chair. He was just sitting there smiling in his booster seat. I whispered that Danny had peed all over the floor, and my mother said we should just eat quickly, which we did. My father paid and we huddled out of the restaurant together, Danny still smiling, and nobody was angry at all. When Danny was a baby there was nothing wrong with him. And sometimes there was nothing wrong with our family either.
My aunt Helene has made a sculpture in memory of my mother. Not only for my mother, but also in honor of all the family members who have died in the past two decades—Danny, Joe, Cecile, and most recently my cousin’s new baby who died at birth. Helene thought it would be a beautiful gift to place outside the Hebrew school that my mother led for so many years. Helene’s bronze sculptures have been commissioned by parks and other outdoor public spaces all around Washington, DC, and the Hebrew school where my mother had presided was pleased to be the recipient of this new work. “They want to have a special commemorative ceremony at the Temple,” my father told Ted and me.
My father has been consumed by planning this service to honor my mother. For months, he’s been consulting with family members over potential dates, persistently asking Ted and me and Nate to deliver speeches, and checking with us about last-minute additions to the invitation list. It’s difficult to understand the degree of my father’s dedication to this event. I’ve tried to stay away from his attempts to rope us into his plans, and so has Ted. “Look,” Ted told him, “go ahead and make the plans. Make whatever speech you want. We’ll come, but you organize it.” For years, the family (including my father) rolled our eyes when my mother would describe the minutiae of her Hebrew school world. But ever since her death, my father’s become enamored of my mother’s stature as a Jewish educator.
It’s a cold, rainy weekend when we drive up to Boston. I’m tired of my family’s preoccupation with death and depression that seems so out of proportion. “Don’t you think it’s strange,” I commented to Ted when I first heard about the ceremony, “to have the sculpture be in honor of a barely born baby?” But Ted thought I was being intolerant. After all, the baby was Helene’s grandchild, he said reasonably.
My father has invited all the relatives and my mother’s closest friends to come back to his house for a meal after the ceremony at the Hebrew school. At first, he was going to have it catered, but then he decided he would handle it on his own. Had I been paying more attention, I might have intruded earlier, but now it dawns on me that my father pulling this whole thing off on his own is going to be impossible. I tell Roy maybe we better go up early, in case he needs some help.
The four of us drive up to Ted’s house in Connecticut for lunch the day before. My father meets us there, and then we accompany him back up to Andover—Roy and the kids in our car, and me and my father in his. On the way, we stop in Brookline at the delicatessen to pick up the bagels for the next day. “How many people were you expecting?” I realize I have no idea how many people he’s invited. “Forty,” he answers, “about forty.”
“We’ll need sixty bagels,” I tell the man behind the counter, “an assortment.”
“No!” My father is suddenly panicked. “I don’t actually think there will be forty people.”
“OK, “ I say. “How many bagels do you want to get?”
“Three dozen, three dozen plain bagels,” he yells out to the man.
“Why all plain?” I ask.
“I think that’s what most people like to eat.”
I can’t figure out his logic. The rest of the family is sitting in the car waiting for us to buy the bagels, and I have no choice but to take over.
“Eight poppy, half a dozen sesame, half a dozen everything, a dozen plain . . .” I tell the man, who’s standing there, waiting for us to decide what we want.
“How about cream cheese?” I try to defer to my father.
“I have some cheeses and spreads at home,” my father says. But as I imagine what his refrigerator might really have in it, I ignore him. “People are bringing pastries,” he tries to tell me.
“Four pounds of cream cheese,” I say to the man. “And lox, we’ll need lox. Four pounds of nova.” I’m treating my father like a child, an insignificant child—not a child of my own. “You can always freeze the leftovers,” I instruct him. I sound like my mother.
Once we get back to the house, I see signs that he’s been attempting to organize a party. On the dining room table is a stack of about twenty-five small-sized plastic plates, for people to put their pastries on, he says. He’s also purchased three fake cut-glass plastic platters to hold the pastries, and some doilies for decoration. It reminds me of the time when Teddy and I were about five and seven, and decided to give my parents a surprise party one summer afternoon and serve ice cream sodas. We set the picnic table in the backyard, excited to start drinking the concoctions we’d made. Much to our disappointment, none of the guests we tried to invite on a half hour’s notice could come. So we opened the box of colored paper straws, and sipped down the ice cream sodas ourselves. But Teddy and I were children. My father is seventy-five years old.
I tell myself that I shouldn’t be surprised by my father’s oblivious behavior. But it’s hard not to be angry at him. Hadn’t he paid any attention over all the years when my mother served all kinds of meals for all kinds of festivities and family gatherings? The buffet drawers in the dining room and the kitchen cabinets are still filled with platters and bowls, and serving spoons, forks, and tongs of all shapes and sizes. How could he have chosen to buy plastic serving trays that we didn’t need, when he hadn’t even considered how he was going to feed the guests? He had invited at least forty people to put down their schedules and travel to the event he’d planned, and all he could manage was a doll’s version of a party. How could he possibly remain so unaware of my mother as the responsible head of our household on a daily basis? It took effort and planning to keep the family organized the way my mother did. Now he has a new adoration of my mother as a Jewish educator, but it’s as if he has no idea at all who she really was.
In the refrigerator, there are some more faint signs of thought. One bottle of Coke, one of ginger ale, and sure enough a couple of pre-packaged cheese spreads. I angrily make my shopping list for the morning: soda, seltzer, juice and milk for the kids, fruit, butter, napkins . . .
In Ted’s old bedroom, I can’t sleep. I nudge Roy to go and check on the kids, who are in my old room. He tells me they’re sleeping and dozes off again himself. I try to breathe myself into some degree of calmness, but the mattress is old and uncomfortable and the sheets are frayed. As the bed creaks and the hours pass, my father’s lack of hospitality becomes excruciating. By dawn I’m completely exhausted.
Everyone’s still in bed when I go downstairs in the morning, except for my father who is standing in the living room waiting for me. His sad eyes dispel my aggravation. It looks like he’s been awake for a while. On the arm of the couch I notice a worn-looking piece of paper with the words that must be his speech written out on it. I realize that he’s been rehearsing.
We don’t have breakfast, but go right out into the cold drizzle and drive to the grocery store. In the daylight, gray as it is, the situation seems more manageable. My father and I comb through the aisles of the store, me reading from my list, my father fetching what he can. We drive home again, and still he doesn’t mention anything, about how he got us into this whirlwind, or about his being thankful for my last-minute help. I think back to the time when he told me about how deeply concerned he was over Ted when he was splitting up with his girlfriend and how he wished he could help him. “Tell him you love him and that you’re there for him,” I tried to offer some basic advice. He looked at me blankly. “I already did,” he said. “I told him that once this was behind him, everything would be fine.” “But did you tell him you love him?” I repeated. He just plain didn’t understand what I was saying. His vocabulary has always been his own.
At the ceremony, my father says the words he’d been practicing. He delivers a lovely speech, honoring my mother in a way he wasn’t able to do at her funeral when he didn’t have the strength. Helene speaks about the sculpture she’s made, about its themes of death and life, and about my mother and our family. The rabbis praise my mother’s contribution to Jewish education. Most of the relatives have come. And there are a number of parents from the school there, too. Even some of the children my mother once taught have come to show their appreciation. After the service, we all go out into the cold dampness and gather around the entrance that leads to the Hebrew school. My father undrapes Helene’s bronze sculpture, the image of a grandfather dancing festively and holding a menorah up high with his grandchildren perched on his arms and at his feet, a dream symbol of a happy Jewish family fortified by tradition.
The rain is driving down heavily when we reach Andover. And the sight of my father’s house is actually almost an oasis. My mother’s friends are already inside, and they’ve set up heaping plates of pastries that they’ve baked for the occasion. Together we arrange the table and manage to give it a sense of bounty. People seem grateful and nourished. I marvel that the occasion has actually turned out alright. My mother has been recognized for her achievements, and my father, who looks gratified, may now be able to leave a portion of his mourning behind him.