Fear of Dying (3 page)

“I told you before and I'll tell you again. He doesn't want to wake because he's depressed and he doesn't want to sleep because he's afraid he'll die in his sleep. So whenever he feels himself drifting, he thinks he has to use the toilet. It only happens fifty times a day. He can't stay and he can't go. I told your sisters the same thing. Why do you all keep asking?”

“Because we love him,” I say.

“I know you do,” Veronica says. “So leave him alone.”

“But we want to help him.”

“How you gonna help him die?”

How indeed? If I could give him that final draft of painless poison, I would. Or would I? When my grandfather asked for sleeping pills at ninety-six, I didn't have the nerve to provide them. I have regretted my cowardice to this day.

How do you help anyone die? I read with amazement the stories of people who reached a certain point of illness or of age and decided it was time to die. It seems the height of both courage and cruelty. Courage because anything so counterintuitive takes courage. And cruelty because it leaves your children wondering if they did something wrong. There's no act you can initiate that doesn't involve other people. We are all interwoven. Even the most rational suicide may come as a blow to someone else.

“Vanessa!” my mother cries out. “Where are you?”

I go in to my mother. My father is curled up beside her, nearly motionless.

“He never talks to me anymore,” she says, pointing a bony hand at my father. “All those years he was the closest person in the world to me and now he doesn't even talk to me. What can you do?”

Until his operation, my father was always complaining that my mother was senile, but now, despite moments of memory loss, she seems far saner than he. She lies by his side all day, enduring the most terrible rejection. Fortunately, she can only focus on it intermittently.

Abruptly, my father gets up. “Veronica!” he screams. Veronica runs in and takes him to the toilet again.

My mother looks at me. “I don't think he really has to go,” she says. “I just think he wants to be alone in the bathroom with that woman.”

“She's the nurse's aide,” I say.

“Don't believe that malarkey,” says my mother. “She's only pretending to be a nurse's aide so she can undress him. I'm wise to all her tricks. I wasn't born yesterday. But I pretend I don't know. One of these days, I'm going to throw her out of the house.”

It wouldn't be the first time. When my mother was a little stronger last year, she fired people constantly. “Get out of my house, you big fat thing!” Sometimes: “You big fat black thing,” she would scream—my mother, who had never been a racist in her prime. I told myself she was more rational now, but she was only weaker. She was biding her time. One of these days, she'd get up screaming like her old self and throw all the strangers out.

“If I should go with the High Class Angels, who'll take care of her?” my father used to rant in the old days when he was strong. The “High Class Angels” fascinated me. Whom did he mean? The Angel of Death? Or was he wrestling with angels as he slept, like Jacob?

And hearing about these mysterious angels, my mother would shriek:
“Nobody has to take care of me! I'll bury you all.”

*   *   *

Sometimes I think she may know more than she lets on.

“I've seen a lot of people die,” Veronica says later, “but your father is one tough old bird. He's going to fight like hell before he leaves this earth. Your mother too. She never stops watching me. You know that time she fell out of bed and had to go to the hospital? She was worried I was doing something with your father. Don't believe she's out of it. She's more together than she looks.”

“How can you stand this work?”

“Who's gonna do it if I don't? You girls? You gonna clean up the shit when it runs down their legs?”

I go in to my mother again.

“When did you get here?” she asks as if we had not seen each other before, as if we had not just been talking.

I sit on her side of the bed. My father is there but not there, asleep, awake, and drifting in between.

“You know, when you get old, you see that everything is a joke. All the things you were so passionate about don't mean a thing. You only did them to keep busy. I used to think it was important that I could dance better than other people, but now I see I was only fooling myself. I only did it to keep busy.”

“I don't think that's true.”

“It is. Even if you're well known, what difference does that make? It doesn't keep you from getting old and dying. People see you come into a restaurant and they say, ‘Isn't that so-and-so?' Well, what good does that do
you
? Or
them
, for that matter. It's all a joke.”

“But you still want to live, don't you?”

“To tell you the truth, I'm bored. I'm bored with everything. Even the things I used to love—like flowers—bore me. Everything except my children. In the end, that's all that matters, leaving children behind on the earth to replace you when you go. Why do you look so sad? What's the matter?”

“You know what's the matter. I don't like you to say you're bored with life.”

“Do you want me to lie to you?”

Actually, yes, I think. Please tell me that life is worth living. Please tell me that all the hassle of getting up, getting dressed, is worth the trouble. I don't want to believe that life is only a joke. I don't think parents ought to tell that to their children. Odd that I am still expecting them to be parents.

“You still look very young,” my mother says.

“There's a reason for that,” I say.

“Good genes,” my mother says.

“Good genes and a face-lift.”

“I don't believe you've had a face-lift,” my mother says.

“Have it your way,” I say.

*   *   *

Before I started to watch my parents fade away, the scariest thing I ever did was plastic surgery. A female ritual like childbirth. It stacks up there with all the other female rituals—genital mutilation, foot binding, whalebone corsets, Spanx. I know men do plastic surgery too now—voluntarily—but it's different for men. Women feel they have no choice. Age still equals abandonment for women. A man can look like he's a hundred, be impotent and night blind, and
still
find a younger woman who never got over her daddy. But a woman is lucky to be able to go to the movies or bingo with another old bag. I considered plastic surgery as mandatory as leg waxing.

First I sent the doctor a check so large I would not be able to back out. Then I spent five months in utter terror. (The last month was the worst.) Then I got on a plane and flew to Los Angeles.

Arrived in the midst of mudslides and heavy weather. (This was two winters before the century turned.) Took a room surrounded by fog in a skyscraper hotel. The floaty fiftieth floor. (Maybe an earthquake would intervene and I wouldn't have to go through with it.) The next morning, early, after disinfectant ablutions, sans breakfast, I limo'ed to the clinic. My darling friend Isadora Wing came with me to give moral support. She waited for me.

The doctor's office was decorated in ice-cream colors and all the nurses had perfect
Mona Lisa
faces done by him. They smiled their half-moon smiles. They reassured me.

I was taken into a rose-colored room with soft lights and told to undress. I was given elastic stockings, paper slippers, a grasshopper-green gown, green cap. I had already prepared by scrubbing myself, my hair, even my
shadow
, with doctor-proffered potions. I garbed myself in these ceremonial clothes and lay back on a reclining chair, a sort of airplane seat for traveling through time. The anesthesiologist and surgeon arrived, also in grasshopper green.

I remember looking into the anesthesiologist's soft brown eyes and thinking, I wonder if he's a drug addict.… We talked about the methods by which unconsciousness would be achieved. He seemed to know plenty about them. Almost imperceptibly, a needle was inserted into one of the veins that branched over my hand. The colorless liquid carried me away like a euthanized dog.

I had picked my doctor because I had seen his work—or rather because I saw that his work was invisible. Most New York plastic surgeons specialize in the windswept look—
Gone With the Wind
face-lifts, I call them. You see them on the frozen tundra of the Upper East Side. Bone-thin women whose cheeks adhere to their cheekbones as if they were extremely well-preserved mummies. My doctor, born a Brazilian with a noble German name (my husband joked that his father must have been the dentist at Auschwitz before hurriedly leaving for the Southern Hemisphere with bags of melted gold fillings), was famed for his tiny, invisible stitches. He was an artist, not a carpenter. He could look at the sagging skin around your eyes and see how to excise just enough, not too much. He could make tiny, imperceptible cheek-tucks that erased the lines of worry and age. He could raise your forehead back into your twenties. He smiled sweetly as anyone would smile anticipating gargantuan fees. This was a hundred-thousand-dollar three-procedure day for him. I drifted off to the Land of Nod.

Time collapsed on itself and died. I didn't. (But if I
had
, I would never have known, would I?) I woke up in a back room of the clinic with a nurse asking me how I felt. Parched. Trussed as a Christmas turkey. With a pounding headache. All over my head.

“Do you want to use the bathroom?”

“May I?”

“I don't see why not.” She took my arm.

I lurched toward the bathroom, used the toilet but avoided the mirrors. I felt as if I had died and been embalmed. Now
I felt
mummified—as if my whole brain had been scooped out through my nose, as if the embalmers had also carved out my soul. Shuffled back to bed. Or the cot that served as a bed.

“How do I look?”

“Not bad, considering,” said the nurse. “Are you hungry?”

“I think so.”

“A good sign.”

The tepid instant oatmeal tasted better than any breakfast I had ever had.

I thought to myself: I'm eating. I must be alive.

The next days—ice packs, immobility, a sense of suspended animation—were grim. The anesthesia lingered like a nightmare. I couldn't stay in. I couldn't go out. I couldn't read. All I could do was watch the Olympics on TV. I am convinced that long hours of TV-watching actually lower your IQ. Television isn't about content. It's about flickering light keeping you company in an empty room.

I recovered to the tune of double axel and triple Lutz. The figure skaters might as well have been skating on my face, given the way I felt. There was nothing to do but stare at the TV and change my ice packs. I ordered consommé and ice cream from room service. I had dreams in which I saw my skin (complete with muscles and blood vessels) being pulled back from my skull. One night, I was awakened in the hotel by fire alarms and a recording announcing, “There appears to be a fire alarm activated. Please stand by for further instructions.” This was repeated for two hours at intervals of seven minutes while I madly called the front desk, getting a busy signal. When I finally got through to him, the concierge pronounced a false alarm. But it was all worth it. After all the bruises were gone, I noticed an uptick in passes made at me.

If life is nothing but a joke, why did I bother with the face-lift?

*   *   *

“I can't believe you've had a face-lift,” my mother insists. “You're too smart to have had a face-lift.”

“Apparently not,” I say.

“And has it given you a new lease on life?” my mother ironically asks.

“What do you think, Mrs. Wonderman?”

“Don't Mrs. Wonderman me,” my mother says. It was an old family line. My father would use it ironically when he was most furious with my mother. Their marriage was tight but occasionally cantankerous, not unlike my marriage to Asher. How did I get here? How did I get to be Vanessa Wonderman? And what did Vanessa Wonderman want? Love, sex, immortality—all the things we can never have. What is the arc of the plot of one's life? I want! I want!

But what did I want? I wanted sex to prove that I would never die.

 

 

 

In their prime, the Wondermans led a glamorous life in the penthouse on Riverside Drive once owned by George Gershwin. They gave glittering parties where famous faces were glimpsed in smoke-filled rooms. “A tinkling piano in the next apartment / Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant.” I thought those lines were written for my parents; they certainly evoked my feelings about their parties—where ladies in satin and marabou smoked cigarettes in holders, clinked champagne glasses, drank in a way nobody drinks anymore, and changed husbands as they changed platform shoes. The men had darkly mirrored hair and thin mustaches like Adolphe Menjou. Limousines circled the block, awaiting them. Chauffeurs were black and wore caps. Maids were black and pretended to be obsequious. They put on their hats when they went home for the day.

When McCarthyism ended their show-biz careers and my parents returned from Hollywood at the height of the Blacklist, they found the Gershwin duplex and filled it with three decades' worth of memorabilia. It was a movie set as much as an apartment. Even the floor in the gallery was mirrored for exhibition dancing. The double grand pianos were lacquered white. The library had framed pictures of them from all their movies and leather-bound copies of all their scripts. The powder room off the gallery was an infinite hall of mirrors where I could stare at innumerable multiples of myself becoming greener and hazier with each reflection.