Anna in the Afterlife (12 page)

TODAY ANNA was to disappear permanently from the face of the earth. “The sun shall not smite me by day nor the moon by night,” she reminded herself. “Six feet under.” “I'm goin' where the sun don't shine.” “Kicking the bucket.” “Dead and buried.” “Cold as a corpse.” “Dead as a doornail.” “Cashed in my chips.” “Bought the farm.” “Gave up the ghost.”

Heir now to these literary gems, Anna was impressed. Dying brought a person into the realm of poetry and eternity, of eulogy and flattery. The bad news, however, was that she'd be silenced for good, her lips buttoned for time immemorial, till death she did part, which was, after all these years of living and fearing and fighting, today.

No more limericks, jingles, complaint letters, no etudes, gigues or nocturnes, no chocolate cakes on her birthday, no flashing of her pretty legs, no pencil and pad at her fingertips, the end of all further opportunities to have her say! What if she turned out to be awake in her grave for the rest of eternity? Stuck there without even a crossword puzzle! She hoped her daughters had ordered a bell installed in her coffin, one with a wire going up to the outside should Anna, by some chance, come back to life.

She had long ago dreamed that her husband Abram had been cured of his leukemia by embalming fluid, but since they had cut out his heart for the autopsy, he was prevented from rising up from his casket. Luckily, no doctors had asked her children if they could cut Anna into pieces. She was probably too poor an example of anything anatomical, too dried up, empty, her bones a latticework of splinters, to be of use to medical research. She hadn't wanted her organs reused either, though do-gooders were always urging people to give their eyes, their kidneys, their gall bladders, to others. Did she want some stranger peeing out of her kidneys, seeing out of her eyeballs? She didn't think so. Besides, her organs were at death's door, like the rest of her, and of no use to anyone.

Out in the living world, all her kin were busy. Janet was answering phone calls from dozens of people (most of them interested in financial gain now that they'd seen the two printed lines in the obituary column—Anna's name, her date of death, and “Proprietor, Goldman's Antiques”). The vultures—some of them dealers Anna used to do business with when she had the store—were calling to ask Janet, with voices full of insincere piety: “Did it take your mother long to die, did she suffer, was she in pain, poor thing, and what happened to the antiques left over from the store, do you want to sell them?”

Sitting at her kitchen table, Carol was on the line with FedCo, asking the price of cold-cut platters. (She could have called Canter's—the only decent Jewish deli in Los Angeles—but it was too expensive.) “Nothing but the best” was not a phrase Anna had taught her children to live by. Now she was feeling the consequences of her philosophy—she'd have third rate corned beef at her funeral reception, seedless Christian rye bread and prune Danish made with lard, with not a single salty black olive or a plate of pickled herring in sour cream on the table.

She'd warned her girls numerous times that she didn't want any transients at her funeral, no flowery baloney in the newspaper (“adored wife, beloved mother, devoted daughter, cherished sister…”), wanted no strangers who would cry crocodile tears and stuff themselves with food pretending they were brokenhearted Anna was dead. Most of all she didn't want a rabbi who had never laid eyes on her announcing in stentorian tones how good she had been in her life and how generous to everyone in need, that she was famous for her mitzvahs—visiting the sick, honoring her parents, donating to charity, and doing a good deed a day.

What if there
were
someone at the gates of heaven (
what if there were a heaven!
) asking Anna how many times she had succored the sick? She had been sicker for longer than anyone she'd ever heard of and had she been succored? Why did people even pretend it was in human nature to help others? Religion just tried to scare you into it. Anna had never been one to respond to threats. If anything, they made her more stubborn and ill-tempered. But now that she was up at the wire, crossing it, in fact, she wondered: should she have been kinder? And to whom?

If there were no atheists in foxholes, were there atheists in morgues? Anna knew that once underground her pretty legs would be consumed.
“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, they crawl in your stomach and out of your mouth.”
She'd sung the song in the childhood alleys of the East Side of New York. “So give me God,” she challenged the universe. “Give me heaven. Give me an afterlife where I get to dance with Abram till dawn, and after that I'll cook him sunny-side-up eggs, bubbling in the pan and sparkling with crystals of kosher salt.” At least Jews cooked with salt that tasted like salt. Jews had taste, and Anna, a Jew in spite of it all, had excellent taste; she always knew which side was up. But now she was going down, six feet under. She felt—beneath her indignation, her outrage, her certainty—a chilling shudder of fear.

The morgue—refrigerator and dressing room combined—was not as lugubrious a place as she had imagined. Two Russian immigrant women were doing the dressing of the dead, babbling to one another in their shrill tongue, and slitting everyone's clothing down the back. They used a giant tailor's shears, like the one Anna's father had owned. The dead weren't cooperative, their elbows did not bend, so the women dressed them as if they were wooden dolls without joints.

Anna winced when they slashed her quilted red bathrobe down the middle of the back—a waste of a perfectly good piece of cloth. They chattered over her face, packing cotton behind her lips and stitching them closed in an extremely unnatural position. Though she no longer felt any of her body parts, she was offended to have her lips redesigned as if she were whistling, which she had never done in her life, believing that a whistle was a crude way to render music of any kind. Now she was especially glad she had demanded a closed casket, unlike her sister Gert, who had so much vanity she wanted to be on display in her evening gown. (Though this would not happen for some time, apparently, which fact annoyed Anna.)

Though Anna had none of the famed powers of ghosts, she would still have done her best to knock the lipstick out of the Russian's hand had the lady dared to try to color Anna's lips. When a person was dead she ought to look like death.

Now between the two of them (were they washerwomen or brain surgeons, you never knew with these Russian women) they maneuvered Anna's remains (she could have been a dead horse for all the respect they paid her) into the cheapest casket offered by the cemetery, a cloth-covered carton, the match to one Abram had been buried in thirty-two years ago. She didn't even want to imagine what was left of him now. She'd seen a movie with Sean Connery who takes a young girl (his mistress as well as his niece) to the Alps ostensibly to climb mountains with her. The villagers discover, on their climb, the body of a young man lost in a climbing accident many years ago and frozen in the ice. When they bring the man back to the village, his fiancée, now a crone as old as Anna, bends over his frost-covered body and sees his beautiful, youthful face gleaming up at her through the ice crystals. That's how Abram lived in Anna's mind, not at the age he died, fifty-six, which was young enough, but long before that, the face with which he courted her, with his wavy hair parted in the middle, and his sweet smile that melted her resistant heart.

A body in a box was what she had come to. She'd seen this before with her father and her mother and her husband, and the end result of a life always violated her trust in any goodness in the world. To think that even babies someday would come to this outrage! No matter what had gone on before, how glorious and successful the life, how much beauty and love and happiness had been the lot of the liver, there was the moment of the box, the closed box sitting on a pedestal, motionless as a mountain. And inside, a human being with the lid down over her face and darkness within. A fancy way to dispose of garbage.

Even though Anna wasn't really in there, it took her breath away to think she might be. Her children didn't know the truth and imagined their mother was in the box. Her granddaughters were clinging to one another in the anteroom of the chapel, refusing to look upon her face in the moment the casket had to be opened for reasons of identification.

“Forgive me but it's required,” said the cemetery representative (an old man with a paunch in a dark suit), “—we must ask that the family certify that this is their deceased in the casket.”

“Who else would it be?” Janet said. She, with Danny beside her, and Carol holding her hand, approached the box. Her daughters' expressions reminded Anna of when she had taken them—as young children—into the “Hall of Horrors” in the fun house in Coney Island. There they encountered a floor covered with wet spaghetti, spiderwebs brushing their faces, bats swooping down from the eaves, and skeletons popping out of the wall on springs. “It's all make-believe,” Anna had explained to them, and she wished she could say it now.
All for effect
, she wanted to assure them.
Nothing's going on here—it all ended back there in the nursing home room when I stopped breathing. That was the happy end. Believe me
.

“Yes, that's our mother,” Janet told the man in the dark suit. She reached inside the box and touched Anna's bony fingers resting on the quilted cloth of the red bathrobe. She knew her daughter would wince—this was not a humane entertainment. Anna herself had touched Abram's dead face in the coffin (a face made rosy with suntan colored liquid makeup) and to this day could feel the cold, clay chill on her fingertips.

Janet leaned over and put a book of music in the coffin—Anna's tattered book of Chopin nocturnes—as well as a sheet of paper with directions to Janet's house for the gathering after the funeral. Then she signed the paper the man held forth, after which he decorously replaced the lid over Anna's face putting forever out of sight that sewn-together mouth.

The family was offered the choice of sitting in the veiled area, out of sight of the mourners, or in the front row of the chapel.

“We'll sit with the others,” Janet said, “but first I have to do something…” She reached into a paper bag and withdrew from it Anna's beloved musicians—the plastic busts of Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Chopin (he was in alabaster, from Italy)—and even Bach, though Anna could take him or leave him, and lined them up at intervals on the lid of Anna's coffin.

A stroke of genius
, Anna thought. In the hush of these funeral places, usually sopping with flowers and organ chords, this was almost anarchy and smacked of idol worship. Anna felt her heart lift: maybe she would have a funeral befitting her spirit after all.

Who were all these people filing in? Anna was certifiably friendless, and yet she saw shades of the past arriving: Corrine Blume, who had taken music appreciation classes with her at UCLA, Arum Hartunian, the rug dealer who had run a fancy Persian carpet store across the street from Goldman's Antiques, Elsie Herriley who had shared a desk with Anna at the first job she held when she was eighteen. And wasn't that her eighth grade teacher, wearing a red suit and a hat with a tall white feather? The bald man was definitely Irving, the delicatessen owner who had given her free Indian nuts from his store on the lower east side of New York, and coming in now were her two New York state-senator employers, Raybinold and Scribner who had introduced her to the high society of New York life. Tessie Fineburg was wafting in the door—her high school friend who had killed herself on the fire escape of her lover/dentist who had betrayed her, and there—in the very back if the chapel—was a row of Anna's old boyfriends. How young and sweet-faced they looked, before they went to war to fight Hitler, before they had bad marriages, or bad children, or bad heart attacks. If any were alive, they'd be ancient geezers, yet here they were with their faces like young Gods, and bodies to match.

Just then a sparkling light caught her attention, directed it upward, where she saw, high up in the balcony, her beloved Abram, the boyfriend she had married. He sat alone, his face shining down upon her like a golden sun, its rays lighting and heating her soul till she felt atomic, as if she would vaporize into droplets of gold.

What a thrill this was, this Life Reunion, more astounding than her passage through the grungy Holland Tunnel on the day she died.

In the chapel, the mourners spoke in hushed whispers, filling out cards to be turned in to the family to announce who had been there. The ghosts would not leave cards, Anna knew, only her daughters' few friends would do that. Of course, her sister Gert was there in the front row with Janet and Danny, her face set in a sour expression, obviously annoyed that all this fuss was about to take place over Anna—which was clearly a waste since she was already dead and beyond appreciating it. Gert, who had already failed to die once—by her own hand—and left a bloody mess behind for Anna's girls to clean up, had given explicit instructions about her death to Janet and Carol: the next time she died, she wanted to be featured in her green chiffon evening gown, so all who passed her coffin could admire her beauty. In fact, Anna could tell Gert wished it were she, right now, in that box on the stage, so she could get her due admiration without further delay and be there to witness it.

Anna heard sobs and saw that her granddaughters were embracing one another and crying. Already they missed her. Such beautiful grown-up young women who carried Anna's genes for brilliance, for music, for language. Not that this aptitude had gotten them so far in life or got them wonderful jobs. Not that it had helped them find rich and powerful mates—but it had prepared them for what music and language were made to provide: beauty and poetry. This was Anna's legacy to them along with a few pieces of antique jewelry, and she was proud of it. She wanted to reassure them that death was only death, neither more nor less than anything else in their lives, their first merry-go-round rides, their first day of school, their first periods, their first kisses. This was their first death (Anna had been through so many she knew the song and dance by heart) and they were trembling as if it were the end of the world.