Stuffed (6 page)

“No, Aunt Lil. Really. I can’t.”

She glared at me over her pince-nez and said, “You need a tazza for sweetmeats, dear.”

Two years went by, and we drove up with a baby.

“What are your neighbors like?” I asked her.

“If you don’t read the
Reader’s Digest,
there’s nothing to talk about.”

“Do you read the
Reader’s Digest
?”

“No.”

This time we had goulash. A new cat jumped on the table and lapped her plate. Aunt Lil wrapped twelve stem cordials commemorating the Battle of the Boyne in a newspaper.

“Please, Aunt Lil. We don’t drink cordials.”

“Don’t tell me what I can give you!”

On her couch were two pillows done in needlepoint. One said, HOPE FOR THE BEST. EXPECT THE WORST. The other, I’VE NEVER FORGOTTEN A ROTTEN THING ANYONE HAS DONE TO ME.

When the next baby came, we drove up again. This time we brought lunch, her favorite: sturgeon sandwiches from Russ & Daughters.

“I told you I wanted
rye
,” she said. “Not egg bread.” I could see she thought I had done it on purpose, done it to be cruel. I asked after her nephew.

“People keep giving themselves away, dear,” she said. “That’s how we learn about them.”

I asked what her happiest memory was.

“It was the day my brother pushed me out of the apple tree. My arm broke in three places. That night Mother permitted me to sleep in her bed.”

Then she gave us the epergne.

“I can’t take this, Aunt Lil,” I told her. I looked at the rococo scrollwork, the lions chasing satyrs chasing maidens chasing cherubs, the cornucopias, the dolphins, the mermaids, and all I could think of was how I’d have to polish it, get it insured, worry about it. How I’d get robbed because I had it. In terms of household goods, what I wanted was a corduroy Happy Baby Carrier.

“I insist,” Aunt Lil said, and we were off.

At home, I shoved the epergne in a closet and tried to forget about it. But every time I opened the door, it hissed, “Polish me! Insure me!”

“That epergne is ruining my life,” I told my husband. We donated it to the Channel 13 auction.

Six months later Aunt Lil called. She asked how I was enjoying the epergne.

“Oh, I love it.” I lied.

“That’s funny,” she said. “I was watching the Channel Thirteen auction, and they had one just like it there donated by you.”

Adrenaline shot to my fingertips. My lips felt carbonated. I was caught in a lie. I made a lame excuse about having two epergnes, and the epergne donated to Channel 13, while similar to hers, was actually the other one. That I needed only one epergne, and hers was so much nicer. I knew she didn’t believe it. Who would? I expected her to be angry. I deserved it. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that a recluse who collected antiques might be watching the Channel 13 auction? Was there something in Aunt Lil that made me betray her? Was there something in me?

I had made it onto Aunt Lil’s hit list. The question was, What took me so long?

I waited for her to hang up on me or say how disappointed she was. But a funny thing happened. She laughed, told me she missed me, and invited us to come up.

“I have an eighteen-karat-gold-mesh etui I’ve been saving for you,” she said. “There’s a lapis on the clasp.”

I couldn’t face someone I’d lied to, even though that meant hurting her doubly. I hurt her once because I lied to her about the epergne, and then I rehurt her by being too ashamed to face her after lying to her.

Time passed. The phone rang. “I’m not well,” Aunt Lil said. “The doctor up here thinks I need an operation.”

I did a little research, then made an appointment for her with a gastroenterologist at Columbia-Presbyterian. She hired a driver to take her to the city. I kissed her good-bye as they wheeled her into the OR. After the surgery the doctor found me in the waiting room. His scrub suit was translucent with perspiration. I could see his chest hair through it.

“Your aunt will be fine,” the surgeon said. “But I’ve never had an experience like that. Cutting her large intestine was like sawing through steel.”

I suppose that’s what happens after eighty-something years of butter and sour cream.

When I visit her the next day, Aunt Lil says, “I’d really like you to come up and take that gold-mesh etui. It’s eighteen karat, dear. I got it at an estate sale. A man shot his wife. She’d been keeping company with a poet.”

“You keep the etui, Aunt Lil. You enjoy it,” I said.

She turned her face to the wall. “I don’t understand,” she said.

When Aunt Lil left my grandmother’s table, the thing the sisters came back to was her long fingernails, how they curved down like talons, how the polish was chipped, how Mandarin they were, how thick, how ridged, and the dirt that collected on their parched and flaky undersides, most likely, I think now, merely residue from spaetzle.

Mom believes you should “never write anything to a boy you wouldn’t want on the front page of the
New York Times.
”

BACON

There are people who say it’s impossible to remember events from the age of one. That pre-verbal memories are actually stories you’ve heard so often, they get codified as memory. But I remember. My sister slams my thumb off in the door. I run to my mother, interrupting her phone call in the foyer, and hold it out to show her. And I remember looking up at a light. A black rubber cup like our toilet plunger sinks closer to my face. I wake up in a different crib next to other children in cribs. My mother’s face is in the porthole of a swinging door. It disappears, replaced by her friend Ruth’s.

Two or more sore throats in a row, and a tonsillectomy was standard operating procedure. It was fun to be sick. There were house calls. Dr. Jackson with his deep, syrupy drawl came into your bedroom and said, “Whale, whale, whale. How’s mah little girl?” You had to stay in bed. Sometimes you had to be “tented.” You’d sit under a sheet with your head as center pole while a glass vaporizer bubbled and hissed with water and Vicks VapoRub to “break up” your lungs.

“Are you breathing?” My mother listened from outside the tent. “Breathe deep! I don’t hear you breathing!”

Recognizable hands slipped food under, a “Spit in the Ocean,” Cream of Wheat with sugar and butter, Cream of Rice, cream cheese and olives on rye, tuna on toast, a BLT thick with mayonnaise, fresh orange juice, homemade applesauce, chocolate pudding. Sometimes the hand brought a toy. But the best thing the hand could slide was bacon. You could have bacon every day, and still it was a treat. Our bacon came from the store. It was thickly cut and had a sweet cure on the edges. Usually my mother would have Mattie make the bacon. But on Sunday nights after a long car trip my mother made it. I loved my mother’s bacon. She fried it so crispy, the fat waves turned brown.

Every medicine chest had a mysterious black ointment called Ichthyol that came in a sinister tube with a multiperforated nozzle. My sister and I took turns squeezing it out the window, watching the black strings pass out of sight on their way to the pavement. Like everybody, we had Unguentine for burns, Bayer aspirin, a can of Squibb powdered toothpaste, the very strange-smelling witch hazel, Vicks VapoRub for the vaporizer but also for growing pains, a blue-glass eye cup for when something got in your eye and the pharmacist at Whelan’s was too busy to take it out, Johnson & Johnson Band-Aids that caused more pain coming off than the injury, Breck shampoo, ipecac (a horrible medicine that made you throw up on the spot and feel better just as fast), and the wonder drug, Desitin. The family dermatological credo was, “If it’s wet, dry it. If it’s dry, wet it.” Desitin worked both ways. It could desiccate a pimple overnight. It could keep scabs moist enough not to fall off prematurely.

Beyond the medicine chest, there was my mother’s magic. When a colony of warts popped up on my knee, she rubbed Unguentine in and said, “You may not look at your knee for a week.” I didn’t. In a week the knee was smooth.

“Warts are psychological,” my mother says. “If you believe they’ll go away, they will. Before there was Unguentine, your grandmother used hamburger.”

“And your warts went away?”

“Of course.”

We called all my mother’s good friends Aunt. In addition to my real aunts, I had Aunt Hortie (Mom’s friend from N.Y.U. she spoke to every morning before getting out of bed), Aunt Dorothy (whose island on Schroon Lake was the high point of summer), Aunt Phyllis (who taught me how to whistle), Aunt Betty (who let me watch her stretch on a Playtex rubber girdle she rolled into a tube), Aunt Honey (who sang on Broadway), Aunt Gladys (Mom’s childhood friend from 845 West End Avenue), Aunt Renee (who designed dresses and was married to “Uncle” Harold, the New York City housing commissioner, whose signature was on a sign at Morgen’s that read OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN 194 PEOPLE IS DANGEROUS AND UNLAWFUL), and Aunt Ruth (who owned racehorses and went to the bathroom with the door open so we could keep talking). Most of them aged well. My mother hasn’t aged at all. When I tell her this, she tries to prepare me. She waxes pragmatic. If there is any way my mother can bumper life’s blows for me, if she could raise her shirt and take each biting, bruising one, she would. So the woman who used to walk backward up Riverside Drive to shield me from the wind says, “I’m not afraid to die. I think of it as a velvet ledge. You’re on black velvet, moving along, and then there’s nothing there. You slide off the velvet ledge, darling. It’s quite comfortable.”

Recently she calls to tell me she doesn’t want the plots.

At first I think she’s saying
plotz.

“We live in Florida now,” she says. “It doesn’t make sense to be buried in Westchester. I’m signing them over to you.”

“I have to be buried by myself?”

“There are four plots,” she says firmly. “You have two. Your cousin Joan has two.”

“
Joanie?
I only see her Thanksgiving!”

We laugh. A week later the deed to plot 034, section 24, comes in the mail.

Down in Florida over Christmas, my mother takes me shopping. She’s discovered it’s easier to drop bombs in the car when she’s looking straight ahead.

“You got my letter?” she says, tooling down Palmetto.

“If this is about the plots again, Ma, I don’t want the plots. I’ve decided. I’m getting cremated.”

“What?”

I remind her that the last time Dad took me to see his father’s grave in Brooklyn, Jacob Volk’s stone was listing. The plot was overgrown. Black swastikas were sprayed all over the place, and every piece of glass that protected the photographs on the head-stones was smashed. Has she forgotten how Dad’s sisters refused to chip in for the upkeep? “I’m going to be cremated, Ma. No one’s going to feel guilty because they haven’t visited my grave. No one’s going to vandalize it. No one’s going to fight over the maintenance charges.”

“Still,” she says, “the thought of it. . . .”

I tell her about my friend Madeline who keeps her mother and father in matching urns in the basement. She waves to them every time she does the wash.

My mother cracks up. What I really want to say is,
You can’t die
until I can’t make you smile.

Studying the slim, chestnut-haired twenty-year-old in the photo Mom has always kept on her dresser, I ask if Dad still looks like that to her.

“He seems just like the day I met him,” she says.

Sitting on his patio, overlooking a lake, my father says, “This isn’t a bad last view, is it? This isn’t a bad way to go.”

“Where ya going?” I say.

Knock wood, ward off the evil eye, I can’t picture anything happening to them. They both love their work. They both play killer tennis. They’ve both had run-ins with scary things, but what does that mean? Most people I know would be dead if it weren’t for modern medicine.

“We’re not afraid to die,” they’ve told me. “There comes a time when you’re ready. We couldn’t have imagined that at your age either.”

Sometimes I see myself at my father’s funeral. Gripping both sides of the lectern, I pause the way Dad would. I develop eye contact. Then I launch into the one about the man who tells his wife he wants his ashes scattered in Bloomingdale’s so he can be sure she’ll come visit. The idea that something could happen to them won’t seem real until it has to. Why should it? What good does it do to taint the present with the inevitable? What good is premature mourning? If you’re lucky enough to have healthy parents, do you have to prepare for when your luck runs out?

The elevator door slams. I get the mail. There’s a letter from the university I went to asking to be remembered in my will. There’s a bulletin from the Authors Guild, they’d like something too. And what’s this from Florida?

RE: Florida Statute 765.05—Living Wills

I, Audrey Volk, willfully and voluntarily make known my desire that my dying will not be prolonged under the circumatances [
sic
] set forth below and hereby declare . . .

I consider the misspelling. Is this document valid? I’m supposed to let my mother go?

I punch her number. “Ma? I got your present today.”

Silence.

“I wanted to get you a Hallmark card. Something appropriate like:

Your living will means lots to me.
A gift that suits me to a tee.

Or maybe:

You gave me life!
I help you die!
You’re as sweet as
Apple pie!

We howl. Hurtling toward the apocalypse, we gasp for air.

The next time I go to Florida, they tell me they’re going to be buried aboveground in a wall.

“You can go in the horizontal way, or you can go in headfirst. Your father and I have decided to go headfirst.”

“Why, Ma?”

“It’s cheaper. Less space, darling.” Then she adds, “I hope you don’t mind. The fellow next to us has a cross.”

They are thrilled with the wall. Every time I go to Florida, Dad says, “Want to see the wall?”

Then a year or so goes by, and their dear friend Fran Boxer dies. She’s cremated, and they decide they don’t want the wall after all. They want to be cremated. My sister is devastated.
The
Guide to Jewish Religious Practice
says the Jewish way of burial is “to place the body in the earth.” Aboveground burial and cremation are
Nivul Hamet,
“a disgrace to the dead.” Some
Nivul Hamets
are arguable. It’s
Nivul Hamet
to donate an organ. But it’s a
mitzvah
to save a life. Mom and Dad couldn’t care less about
Nivul
Hamet.
They’re agnostics.

Dad tries to sell the slots back to the slot owner, but he refuses to refund the money. “Fine,” Dad tells him. “I’ll sell them myself.”

“You can’t,” the slot man says. Slot prices are up. The slot man won’t be undersold.

Dad writes his congressman. He cc:’s the Attorney General, the local papers, the Better Business Bureau, the Consumer Protection Agency. Dad is energized. He’s in full battle mode. He’s six feet one and a half of megawatt power. He’s right, and he knows it. He owns the slots, hence the slots are his to sell. Dad’s latest plan is picketing the slot wall wearing a sandwich board explaining how the slot place violates free trade.

After two months the slot man crumbles. Dad sells the slots for less than the going rate. A couple who wants to go in headfirst gets a bargain. Dad carries a laminated card in his wallet that says who to call to cremate him. He signs up for organ donation and flattens a green bumper sticker onto his car: RECYCLE YOURSELF. BE AN EYE, ORGAN & TISSUE DONOR. He earmarks his new titanium hip for a medical school so they can study the effects of wear. He wants his de-cataracted eyes to go to Columbia’s Eye Institute.

Dad tells me his slot victory over the phone. He won’t come to New York anymore. He’s turned on his birthplace. The last time Dad came up, we spent over an hour in the Museum of Natural History looking for Admiral Peary’s sled. In 1909 Admiral Robert Edwin Peary
claimed
he discovered the North Pole. (There’s proof that he doctored his journals and so did the explorer Dr. Frederick A. Cook, which means the first man to set foot on the North Pole was someone named Joseph Fletcher, who landed there in an air force C-47 in 1952, but why would I get into that?) Dad used to visit Admiral Peary’s sled on Saturday between radiation appointments for acne and the burlesque. I thought I’d known every lonely fact of my father’s childhood. I am sad-struck anew thinking about Dad’s solitary Saturdays, a twelve-year-old boy with pubescent pimples taking the subway alone to a skin doctor, then going to the burlesque, where for fifty cents he could sit in the balcony and watch the
Earl Carroll Vanities
with “75 of the Most Beautiful Girls in the World.”

“I learned to live by myself, for myself,” Dad says. “I had no expectations.”

We pass the Indian war canoe three times. We scour the basement. All we can find is Roald Amundson’s sled, the one he used crossing the Arctic via the North Pole. That and some threadbare gear from the Antarctic explorer Lincoln Ellsworth. No one can tell us anything about Admiral Peary’s sled. None of the guards or information people has
heard
of Admiral Peary. That does it. Standing outside at the top of the stairs behind J. E. Fraser’s statue of Teddy Roosevelt and his guides, staring into the marvelous scrotum of Roosevelt’s horse, Dad takes one last look around. “That’s it for me,” he says. “I’ve had it with New York.”

The fact that Dad won’t fly up anymore doesn’t stop him from mailing envelopes stuffed with articles:

MUSIC BOOSTS INTELLIGENCE
LAPTOP PROTECTION
TEST YOUR FINANCIAL FITNESS

And just today, MICHELLE PFEIFFER: FORMER OUTCAST. Sometimes he sends them with a little note: “Thought this would be of service—Dad.”

SLIDE WOODEN DRAWERS MORE EASILY
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CAFFEINE
BE A WINNER

Four times a year now, Mom comes alone.

“I have a new way of looking at your apartment,” she tells me after her latest visit. I’m driving her to La Guardia Airport so she can catch the three-fifty back to West Palm.

“You do, Ma?”

“It’s a ruin. It’s like visiting the Colosseum or Pompeii.”

She’s sitting next to me on the front seat. Maybe I should say
folding.
Her body is curved inward, and her head is down so low it’s almost touching the seat.

“Ma, why are you sitting like that?”

“It’s nothing. I’m a little nervous the way you drive. Really, darling, it’s nothing.”

The way
I
drive? The last time I was in Boca, Mom drove up on the median three times and kept going left when she meant to go right. “Why are people flashing their lights at us?” she said, ticked until she realized her headlights weren’t on.

“When we get to the house,” I told her, “I’m going to kiss the driveway.”

She gasped. “You think I’m not a good driver?”

Mom aims for perfection. Most times she gets a bull’s-eye. She’d like to pump some perfection my way too. To that end, she makes lists. The latest one reads:

MOTHER’S LIST

Reupholster couch
Take care of IRA
Fix shelf in Polly’s room
Get round kitchen table and six chairs
Get large colorful object for coffee table