My mom wasn't crying. Her eyes were sparkling, and I thought it was because she was happy, even impressed with me, as if I'd turned out to be just as special, just like she'd always said I was.
"I know how proud your father would be, too. I know how proud you always made him. You were--you are--the most wonderful daughter anyone could ever ask for, and even if you drive me crazy sometimes..." I smiled a little, and she did, too. "And I drive you crazy a lot of the time..." She wiped underneath her eyes carefully, with just the pad of her forefinger, like Elle had shown her. "You're the best thing I've ever done. You're the best thing I could have ever hoped for. And I know that you will be, as the Torah says, a woman of valor, like Sarah and Rachel and Rebecca and Leah, your namesake. I know that even if you don't get exactly what you want exactly when you want it, you'll be strong and you'll be smart and you're already beautiful, and I know that you're going to have a wonderful life, because I know you've already learned one of the most important lessons of all."
"Close your eyes," I said as we walked into the ballroom of the College of Physicians, and I held my hands over my mother's face to make sure she couldn't see. I walked behind her, guiding her into the ballroom. "Okay...now!"
For a minute she didn't say anything, and then she started to cry. "Oh, Joy," she said, and clapped her hands. "You didn't!"
I did. All of my years building scenery for a dozen different Philadelphia Academy plays and musicals had finally come in handy, and my friends had helped. We'd been able to transform the big ballroom into a
Sound of Music
wonderland in celebration of the sappiest musical of all time, which of course was my mother's favorite. Each of the tables was one of "My Favorite Things." There were raindrops on roses (Tamsin and I had worked for an entire Sunday making papier-mache flowers, then gluing round crystals to them) and whiskers on kittens (that was the kids' table; we'd bought a pile of stuffed animals, and each kid could take one home). There were bright copper kettles (Aunt Sam knew a party planner who'd gotten a bunch of them on loan from Fante's in the Italian Market) and warm woolen mittens (Grandma Ann and Mona had spent the last three weeks speed-knitting). The favors were in brown paper packages tied up with string, and for dessert there were crisp apple strudels, even though I'd drawn the line at serving schnitzel with noodles for lunch, because I didn't know what it was and thought it sounded disgusting.
"'Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes,'" my mom recited. Tamsin twirled proudly and beamed.
"'Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes,'" I recited, and led my mom to the head table, where there were a dozen different snow globes as the centerpiece (each one had a different Philadelphia scene at its center and a blank space for guests to slide in a picture that the photographers would take).
"'Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings'?"
"Um. The banquet manager nixed that. You can't have wild livestock in a public place for the purposes of...you know...entertainment."
"Well," she said, "I have no doubt that you tried."
Todd strolled over, wearing a silver suit, pulling a skateboard with a spool of rope on top of it. "See if you can get it," he said.
She only had to think for a minute. "Are you 'So, a needle pulling thread'?"
"You see?" said Todd, turning to his sister. "It's obvious to anyone who knows the musical."
"I still think the lederhosen looked better," she said.
Todd handed the skateboard to his sister and pulled me toward the empty dance floor. "Come on, Joy," he said. "Let's dance."
It wasn't as fancy as Tyler's party, or as big as Tamsin and Todd's, but all of my friends had fun. There was a chocolate fountain for dessert, which the caterers shut down after Max tried to jump inside it. There was even a small scandal when my mom hauled Aunt Elle into the lobby and whisper-yelled at her for dirty-dancing with Jack Corsey ("The boy is thirteen years old, Elle!" she said, and Aunt Elle smirked and said, "Today he is a man").
I danced with Todd. I danced with Bruce. I held Max under his armpits and let him balance his little black loafers on top of my silver sandals. I even danced with Cara for a minute, before she sniffed and said, "Stupid," and went back to her table. When Duncan Brodkey tapped my shoulder, saying, "Hey, you wanna?" I smiled at him and took his hand, feeling my skin, my whole body, lighting up when we touched.
After the cake-cutting and the candle-lighting and the speeches, when the music was just starting to wind down, I sat on a bench in the medicinal herb garden, thinking about my father. We'd go to the Franklin Institute and walk through the giant heart, or to the Academy of Natural Sciences to look at dinosaur skeletons. We would ride our bikes on the towpath from Manayunk all the way to Valley Forge, and my mom would meet us there with a picnic lunch. We'd go to the Reading Terminal for blueberry pancakes and turkey bacon at the Dutch Eating Place, and buy whatever looked interesting (a leg of lamb once, and another time a guinea hen), and bring it home and figure out how to cook it for dinner.
The bench creaked as my mom sat down beside me. "Are you all right?"
I nodded.
I miss my dad,
I wanted to say, but it was as obvious as the air around us, the ground underneath my feet. So instead I said, "My...your, um, father. He didn't stay for the service?"
She sighed. "I think he took off. At least, I didn't see him."
I pulled the silver dollar out of my purse and handed it to her. My mother turned it over in her hand. "He used to throw these in the swimming pool, and we'd dive for them," she said.
"I know," I said. "It was in your book."
She sighed and nodded.
"It was nice of him to come, I guess," I said. She said nothing. "So maybe he really was okay. Right?"
"Nobody's just one thing or another," my mother said. "Nobody's just bad or just good." She sniffled and wiped her eyes. "It was nice that he came."
"It was," I said, and for a minute I leaned my face against her shoulder and let her hold me up.
When I got home I hung my beautiful dress in my closet. I'd never wear it again, I knew. Maybe I'd give it to Cara, and she could wear it someday--except probably the fashions would change in the next three years, and she'd have her own ideas about what was beautiful.
I took the silver dollar out of my purse and my jewelry box off my bookshelf. The box had been a birthday present from Maxi when I turned eight. Inside was a plastic ballerina; she spun and played "Beautiful Dreamer" when you wound the knob on the back. There wasn't much in there: a silver bracelet my father had given me for my last birthday, two twenty-dollar bills from a babysitting job, and a picture of Duncan Brodkey that I'd taken from the yearbook office's pile of discards. It was better than nothing, I thought. A silver dollar that my mother had once dived under the water for, an
I'm proud of you.
A mother who loved me, maybe more than I wanted her to sometimes. A father who'd loved me, then died. It was more than a lot of kids got.
I ran my fingers along the bottom of the box until I found what I was looking for: my old silver baby rattle, engraved with
JOY.
It could work for another baby, I thought, and I slipped it in my pocket and went downstairs to look for the silver polish.
A
s the days piled up into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and fall slid into winter, I realized one of the great truths about tragedy: You can dream of disappearing. You can wish for oblivion, for endless sleep or the escape of fiction, of walking into a river with your pockets full of stones, of letting the dark water close over your head. But if you've got kids, the web of the world holds you close and wraps you tight and keeps you from falling, no matter how badly you think you want to fall.
Frenchie scratched at the screen door, and I let her out, and when she whined, I let her back in. Joy outgrew her shoes, so I took her to the mall to get another pair, plus winter boots and a new winter coat. When she drank all the milk, I would go to the supermarket, just like a normal person, and buy more...and if anybody noticed that I was wearing a men's blue bathrobe under my long winter coat, none of them said a word. I cooked dinners, ran the dishwasher, emptied it, then cooked some more and filled it up again. The leaves fell, and I swept them off the sidewalk. The snow fell, and I shoveled it and salted the front steps, trying not to cry when I pulled the shovel out of the closet, trying not to remember the way Peter and I would tease each other about whose turn it was.
December was awful. I avoided the stores full of tinsel and carols and holiday lights, the happy hand-holding couples lingering in front of the jewelry-store windows on Sansom Street, the crowds of families at the mall, but eventually, I had to go to Target to pick up Tupperware and paper towels, washcloths and diapers and wipes. I was doing fine, piloting the shopping cart around the perimeter of the store, avoiding the video and music section, where Peter and I used to linger, when the bread-machine display stopped me in my tracks.
I groaned out loud, remembering.
We should get a bread machine,
Peter had said.
Fresh bread would make the house smell good.
But the bread always comes out gummy,
I'd said.
It's good when it's toasted,
he'd replied.
I'd told him that we didn't have the counter space, and he'd said that maybe we could consider relocating the cappuccino machine because, honestly, how often did we use it? And I'd said the cappuccino machine was more aesthetically pleasing than a boxy plastic gummy bread maker. Then I'd go home and make a frothy, noisy cappuccino, and he'd sigh and give up until the next time we walked past bread machines in a department store, when he'd look at them wistfully, as if they were a row of girlfriends who'd gotten away. Sometimes he'd run a finger down one of the digital displays and heave a sigh, and I'd say
Forget it
and keep pushing the cart toward the toilet paper and the juice boxes.
On the speakers overhead, Mariah Carey's "O Holy Night" gave way to "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." I leaned against the Crock-Pots and started to cry. Why hadn't I just bought the damn bread machine? It would have made him happy. It would have made the house smell good. And even bread-machine bread was good when it was toasted. What was wrong with me? Why hadn't I--
"Ma'am?"
I wiped my eyes. A clerk in a red polyester pinny was staring at me. I pulled a package of tissues out of my pocket (these days I never left home without them) and pointed at the Crock-Pots.
"I thought they were on sale," I said weakly. The clerk led me to what must have been the break room, a cheerless white-tiled windowless space with red plastic tables, a refrigerator, and a microwave. "He's never coming back," I said to myself. Or I'd meant to say it to myself, but the clerk must have heard me.
"Ma'am?" he said. "Are you sure you're all right? Do you have anyone I can call?"
"I'm okay," I managed, and hurried to the cash register, then my car, where I could cry in peace.
Time passed. I read the copy of
See It, Be It
that my sister had given me, and tried to visualize my desired end results: not just looking normal but feeling that way, too. In March I baked hamantaschen for the Preschool Purim Parade, because I always did that, and I hadn't called the synagogue to say that I wouldn't, because I couldn't stand the thought of explaining to the stranger who might answer the phone that they'd been my husband's favorites, only now my husband was dead. In April I planted purple and yellow pansies in our window boxes so that ours weren't the only empty ones on the street. I cut back the roses. I watered the hostas. I swept and weeded, keeping up appearances, thinking that I could fake normal, could fake happy, even if I never felt that way again.
I went on walks with my mother, out to brunch with Samantha, to New York to visit my sister, and I talked to Maxi on the telephone. I sat on the sidelines at Joy's softball games and tried not to stare at Peter's replacement as first-base coach, a man I'd never seen before, with reddish hair and twins in the outfield. I found a therapist for Joy--a man, at her request--and I dropped her off every Wednesday and didn't ask questions when I picked her up, even though I could tell from her swollen eyes that she'd been crying in there. She had to cry somewhere, I figured. At home she was making lists, doing price comparisons of diapers in bulk on the Internet, printing out articles about educational toys and signing the as-yet-unborn child up for music appreciation, which began at the unbelievably early age of three months.
At night, when I couldn't sleep, I wrote, imagining that I was a young mother again, with a mug of tea cooling next to my laptop and Frenchie snoozing on a pillow by my side, dressed in my husband's sweatshirt, the one that still held a hint of his smell. Sometimes, when I woke up, I would imagine that I could smell him, that he was still there, that I would open my eyes and see him, his head on the pillow, eyes open, lips curved into a smile, saying my name.
Betsy called every week or so. She e-mailed pictures from the twenty-week ultrasound, pictures of her belly and her boys patting it proudly (but not, I noticed, pictures of her husband--maybe it was just that he was always the one behind the camera, or maybe there were more deliberate editorial choices going on).
By the end of January, I had a rough draft of the book I'd started the week of Peter's funeral, and I shyly presented it to Larissa. It was called
The Family Way,
about a man in the suburbs, a judge, wealthy and stable and secure, who at fifty fell in love with a much younger woman, married her and started a family, in spite of being married with children already. It was told from the perspective of the dead man, in heaven; the first wife; and the first wife's oldest daughter, who referred to her mother as Original Style and his father's young bride as Extra Crispy. It was, I supposed, an attempt to make sense of a version of my own father's life, to take a man like him and crack him open like an oyster, solve his puzzles, make him both similar to and different from my own father, to make sense of things.
Maybe it was a real book, or maybe it was just 350 pages of throat-clearing, the gunk I needed to get out of my system before I could do the real work again. I couldn't be objective. I'd have to wait and see. Either way, no matter what the pages turned out to be, they had comforted and sustained me, had given me something to think about other than how much I missed Peter, something to do besides cry. For that, I would always be grateful.
On the Friday night before Valentine's Day, at ten o'clock at night, the telephone rang. I talked to Betsy, then sat cross-legged on my big empty bed, the telephone in my hand and the silence of the house pressing down around me. "We did it," I said softly, and sat there and hoped for an answer. When none came, I cried for a few minutes, clutching a pillow to my midsection, wishing that for once I could have gotten things in the right order: a husband and then a baby.
You get what you get,
I told myself, the way I used to tell it to Joy when she was little, when I'd cut her grilled cheese into rectangles instead of the preferred triangles, when I put on her sneakers instead of her beloved green rubber rainboots, and she'd cry.
You get what you get, and you don't get upset.
Soon, I supposed, I'd be saying it again.
I washed my face, combed my hair. I walked down the hallway, imagining I could see Peter standing in front of the linen closet, looking for his wool blanket, carrying a basket of laundry to the washing machine. Then I tapped on my daughter's bedroom door. "It's a boy," I said.