I Don't Have a Happy Place (15 page)

•   •   •

Three days later, my home dentist explained that although I'd been told I was part of the 1 percent of the population who had no wisdom teeth in her head—which, he joked, didn't mean I wasn't wise—he'd found out I did indeed have one and it was growing sideways out of my gums and straight into my cheek. The dentist had never seen anything like it and called in a colleague and three hygienists to see.

“Congratulations, sweetie,” said Paulina the hygienist, touching the ring on my finger. “Did it just happen?”

Had I been in regular form, I would have regaled this stranger with tales of sun and sand and stories of love past and future and way more information than she'd bargained for. But as the dentist poked at the disfiguring and insistent tooth, I just nodded politely, sucking in the nitrous, enjoying the flight above the room without retelling the backward tale of casual sex and shrimp fajitas.
That's your story?
she'd say, as I wiped my sweating palms on my jeans, staring at her central-casting white spongy shoes.
It is
, I'd say.

Maybe I'd say more, because I'd be high on laughing gas. Maybe I'd tell her that I like our story because it embodies us perfectly, that it is at once lovely and ridiculous. That of course there is love and like, but there is also Alfred Molina. Buzz brings so much to our story. He brings humor, he brings intrigue, he brings the plot. He is always willing to go to Ikea, and his charm is mayoral. He explains
The Hunt
for Red October
–style movies to me and knows I have a weakness for celebrity impressions. He is versed in which donuts I like and will always do the talking at a party so I can be uncomfortable in peace. And while he actually believes his dishy good looks might signal to others that he's been in a bar fight or two, to me his handsome face skews more nice Jewish Colombian drug lord who went to summer camp. He's man-about-town to my woman-stay-at-home. He's a gamer and fiercely loyal, and although he is admittedly dead inside, I know that sequestered somewhere in there is a neon—albeit murmurish—heart that flashes and hums when you need it to.

We were married seven months later, in an old movie house in upstate New York. The guests ate Twizzlers and popcorn as Buzz and I walked down the aisle together. Yes, my mother wore
pants. Our vows spoke of love and honor and all that, adding in a much worked-on line that promised there would be
no situation in which we can't find laughter
.

Buzz still uses this line most days, usually when making fun of me.

“You don't even understand the vows,” I say.

“
You
don't,” he says. “We're finding laughter.”

“No.
You
are finding laughter at my expense.”

“Have you met you?”

And so goes the marriage. This is our story.

A Very Special Episode

• • • • • •

T
he floors of the funeral home were shiny, like Granny Smiths in the supermarket. It smelled like lemons, not dead people, and everyone was mingling and kissing like they were at a bar mitzvah. My mother, all of a sudden, was starring on
Falcon Crest
, leaving fuchsia, egg-shaped marks on the cheeks of guests, drooping her head at the mumbling of the words
sorry
and
my sympathies
.

We were instructed to move operations to a special room earmarked for family members of the deceased, and I watched my parents and Ace excuse themselves from the ballooning crowd. When I felt Buzz's hand on my back pushing me in the same direction, I rooted my shoes, not wanting to budge, but instantly lost the battle, as my soles were unscuffed and those lustrous floors tricky.

“Stop pushing me,” I said.

He pressed harder. “I'm not pushing you.”

“You're pushing.”

“I'm
guiding
you,” he said. Buzz was no abuser but I still contend he'd already shoved me through the revolving door at the airport that morning, no matter what he said. “Just go.”

He slid me closer to the portal of a room I imagined vice presidents were squirreled away to in the event of an assassination attempt. Down the hall of Paperman & Sons, past the bathrooms and a sign announcing the services of Bella Steinmetz and Hershey Finkel and our own Pearlie Segal, I stood outside the Family Room. The lighting was pleasant enough, though that piped-in organ music swirled through my brain, summoning flashes of endless hockey games, and days in Samantha Narvey's basement, listening to her play “When the Saints Go Marching In” on the electric organ as her father cracked their greyhound for peeing on the sheepskin rug.

I'd read somewhere that when adults return home to spend time with their parents, it's not uncommon to revert back to the same behaviors they exhibited at, say, thirteen years old. As I sent poisonous darts at my mother's hairsprayed helmet on the day she was to bury her own mother, I chalked it up to statistics.

The sign on the door said
FAMILY ROOM
, but clearly the definition of family had a different meaning for all, because the place was packed, mostly with my parents' friends. Dark-suited men huddled; a knot of women in black outfits showcasing chunky jeweled necklaces whispered about the golf club. My parents were the only one of their group not to join the Club, and I'd spent my entire youth hearing golf gossip at dinner. My mother didn't play golf or tennis or even really go outside, but it was a gathering place for well-to-do Montreal Jews and she felt left out. She'd lament the summer weekends because all their friends were at the Club, and although I'd never set foot in the place, I hated it.

•   •   •

The call about Grandma Pearlie came on Wednesday, six a.m., Eastern Jewish Standard Bad News Time. Apparently she'd died the day before in the early afternoon but my parents waited to place the call. I've never studied Judaism but am sure somewhere in one of the books it states that all tragic news must be delivered before sunrise. To this day, if the phone rings in the early morning hours, I start calculating who is dead. I remember reaching over Buzz to get the phone and barely hearing my mother's words but also somehow knowing exactly what she was saying. Her voice was small and far away, and I said “What?” at least twice before I heard the sentence, “Grandma Pearlie died.” I don't remember hanging up, only Buzz gathering me in as tears dripped onto his white Approved Sleeping T-shirt.

The only death I'd encountered to date was when my brother's hamster ate his pregnant hamster wife, leaving their unborn children in various stages of chewed up, but I was sheltered from the carnage because no one let me go down to the basement to see. I was six years old; there was no funeral. Somehow, because my parents married young and came from small families, I'd managed to avoid death altogether. Even when our Yorkshire terrier died I was away at college and dodged my father's misery during the disposal of Milk-Bones and leashes and that full-body navy snowsuit with hood that the dog hated.

I'd seen plenty of dying and funerals in movies, which is how I knew to dig out that pair of black pants from the back of my closet, the ones I'd bought to make me look serious at work. They were called Editor Pants, from Express, and they were kind of a big deal because they cost more than twenty bucks and also came with a name. I was supposed to get them altered but never did, so they scraped the floor as Buzz pushed me along the halls of Paperman & Sons.

When someone died on
Guiding Light
, all they focused on were oversized black hats and decanters of brandy and revenge. But clearly there were other major parts of death and funerals. Like the toffee-colored guest book I couldn't stop obsessing over.
Who the hell would come to my funeral?
I wondered. This caused instant hostility toward my charming and likeable best friend in Manhattan, who would, for sure, have way more people show up to her death.

“You're still standing out here?” said Buzz, returning from the men's room. I pretended not to hear him. He
guided
me again and I kept my head down, thinking it might keep well-wishers at bay. I had a hard enough time making small talk under regular circumstances. I knew I'd earned a get-out-of-jail-free card, being a mourner and all, but I didn't have it in me to say anything to anyone, and although I didn't want to discuss my grandmother with these people, I couldn't bear to hear about their golf game or kids either. And I certainly didn't want to talk about the weather, which is my least favorite topic, unless I bring it up.

And so I used some of the techniques I'd perfected for pretending I was crazy on the streets of New York if I felt some weirdo following me down Avenue B. It was basically a lot of face acting—alternating looks of concern and surprise, all the while arranging my eyebrows in different stages of ascent. I'd learned some of the moves from a relative who often wore fur coats in June and believed the FBI was tapping her refrigerator. I launched into these maneuvers while facing away from Buzz so he wouldn't think I was having a stroke. It was just as I was organizing myself at the optimum angle that I saw it. Right there in the middle of the room, minding its own ­business.

As with most of my death experiences, the only coffins I'd ever seen were in the movies and on TV. Those were usually
deep cherry or rich mahogany with satiny interiors fit for the likes of Liberace. Fancy stuff. But the one in front of me, the one that housed Grandma Pearlie, was pale and cheap looking and instantly made me feel the way I do when I catch a glimpse of an old person eating meatloaf alone in a diner. It was so rinky-dink that it looked like my father put it together in the backyard. Well, maybe not
my
father, since he carried a purse, plus it's no secret that most Jewish men don't usually wield hammers. We know better to leave the fix-it stuff to the Gentiles. But
a
father, in
a
Christian living room somewhere, might have put this casket together on Christmas morning.

Grandma Pearlie was in a box. Why did my mother choose this Ronco Fantastic Casket kit for her own mother? I imagined the choices at her disposal, all the colors and sheens and snazzy interiors. My mother has never left the house, never even left her room, without makeup. So why box up her mother in this? I overheard someone mentioning that the box was pine, but to me pine was the bedroom set Bonnie Caplan had in seventh grade. This thing wasn't the smooth four-poster bed and matching dresser with full-length mirror; this pine seemed like it might give you splinters if you touched it the wrong way.

“What's with the box?” I said to Buzz, who muttered something vague about Jewish law. My family was Jewish a couple of times a year, and mostly that entailed eating roast chicken or a light meal of dairy after my nana made us fast. What I knew about Jews came from that Mordecai Richler book they made us read in high school and from my religious tenth-grade boyfriend. I did recall him once telling me that the reason Jews bury their dead so quickly is to avoid humiliation for the deceased. Clearly whoever wrote that rule never saw the grapefruit crate my grandmother was stuffed into.

And it's not like Grandma Pearlie was religious. As a matter of fact, when Grandpa Solly occasionally went to shul, she stayed home to watch
The Price Is Right
or take a bubble bath with the oversized bottle of Fa bubbles that lived on the side of her tub. Did all the Jews at Paperman & Sons get this box? There were some pretty fancy Jews in Montreal and I couldn't imagine them choosing this option to send their families off to wherever it was Jews believed in, even if it was the law. My father drove a chocolate brown Jaguar and wore custom-made cowboy boots with his suits, my mother wore sunglasses indoors; they loved being fancy. It certainly was not glitzy to send off one's loved one for all eternity in something that looked like I'd made it at summer camp.

I wondered what Grandma Pearlie looked like jammed in there. No matter how tight I scrunched my eyes, I couldn't make out her face. All I could picture was E.T. in the scene where he was dying, all gray and shriveled. I thought of how I was quasi-claustrophobic and had to sit on the aisle at the movies so I could evacuate if need be. I made a mental note not to be put into a box when I died. I decided then and there to be cremated, even though a college friend once told me her uncle was cremated and her aunt got a Ziploc in the mail that said
R
EUBEN SCHLOSS—­CREMAINS
on it in Magic Marker. His whole body fit into a sandwich bag. If you looked closely enough, she said, you could even see chips of bone.

“I have to get out of here,” I said to Buzz.

“Are you all right?”

“No. It smells like lemons and people are dead.”

I left Buzz alone in the Family Room, seeing as my parents and their friends preferred him anyway, and escaped to the bathroom. It was unnerving how still and squeaky clean the place was. I knew there were two other services taking place that day and yet there wasn't a person in sight. Except for one man
I noticed in the distance, dressed in a brown suit that had seen better days. Grandpa Solly. I had been avoiding being alone with him since I got to town. We were not the kind of family who said
I love you
out loud, ever, so how could I possibly have the words, or the courage, to speak to my grieving grandfather. Plus, he'd been a little off as of late, as evidenced by his entrance to my parents' apartment that morning.

“Moe is a bastard,” he said, whizzing by me when I opened the door for him.

“Not today, Daddy.” My mother was by the window, outlining her lips with fuchsia pencil, filling in the rest with Pepto-pink lipstick, the same shade she wore fifteen years ago when I was in high school. It was rare to see her apply makeup in public. Mostly it was done behind the closed bathroom door, her version of Superman's phone booth. In all my years, I had never seen her undecorated or undressed. I have never really seen her.

“I'll tell you one thing, if you think I am going to talk to him in this lifetime, you got another thing coming.” Grandpa Solly followed my mother, hands in his pockets. He jangled quarters and those generic stripey mints, the same ones he'd toted around when I was a kid. He didn't say much but you could always hear him coming, like a janitor. He was also carrying a small duffel bag that appeared to hold a change of clothes.

“Jesus, Daddy,” my mother said. “Your teeth are going to crack in half.”

“Well, if they do,” he said, “I'm not going to that dentist of yours. Son of a bitch will soak you for all you're worth.”

My mother
tsk
ed. “Fine. Just get dressed.”

“I am dressed. Nothing wrong with these trousers.”

“Mom would have wanted you to wear your navy suit.”

“That's
your
story,” he said, walking away toward the wall of glass windows. He stared out onto the city, carrying on with
the pocket rumpus. I wasn't used to Grandpa Solly talking back to my mother—or, really, talking much at all—but I'd heard my father say something about how he'd recently wandered in off the street to an assertiveness training course at the Jewish Y, which may have had something to do with his new behavior. Plus his wife was dead.

There were laugh-track sounds from the den, where Ace and my father were on the couch together, dressed in dark suits, very busy staying out of things. Grandpa Solly walked into the guest bathroom and locked the door. I could swear I smelled cigarette smoke. My mother made phlegmy sounds, then snapped her hairsprayed helmet in my direction. “Why isn't anyone ready?”

“You have lipstick on your teeth,” I said.

•   •   •

“I go down to that McDonald's on St. Catherine. About six in the morning,” said Grandpa Solly, returning from the bathroom. He smiled and I saw that one of his teeth was missing. One near the front. “I walk or take the bus. Sometimes I ask the paperboy to drive me. I have coffee and talk to the guys.”

I wondered when my grandfather got “guys.” Grandpa Solly wasn't a guy's guy, but more of a sit-with-the-ladies type. He could spend hours at the little shopping center near their apartment, sitting on a bench, reading circulars or staring out the window while my grandmother picked up her watch from the jeweler or the latest hardcover from the public library located upstairs. She'd bring him Styrofoam cups of coffee with eight sugars from the PIK-NIK and ask him how he was doing. “Fine and dandy,” he'd say. “Fine and dandy.”

Imagining him talking to the guys seemed inconceivable, as I could count the words he'd uttered in my lifetime. When calling our house, he'd say, “How do you do? Let me get Pearlie,” as if
we'd called him. He was her built-in studio audience, even near the end, when her brain frazzled and I'd sit on their salmon-colored velour couch for an hour as Grandma Pearlie asked me when I was heading back to New York on a continuous loop. In groups his silence was even more pronounced. At holiday gatherings, he was unapparent, remaining mum and seated as the coffee and cookies were served, not leaving the table with the other men to watch the game, even when Zaida Max asked him where his dress and pocketbook were.