Tales From the Crib (29 page)

After spending the week with us after Adam was born, Anjoli discovered that she wasn’t all that necessary around the Drama Queen after all. Alfie and his regular cast of unemployed stage actors and crew kept the shop running more smoothly than when Anjoli was there. Her depth of knowledge of theatre proved extremely helpful when chatting with customers, but with her out of the daily routine of the store, there were no more late tax fees from the IRS, no more fines from the City of New York for code violations, and no more letters from Con Ed threatening to turn off the gas and electric.

“Let’s get in the car and check this place out!” Jack said, hovering over the newspaper one Sunday morning while still in his pajamas. “Don’t say a word, Luce,” he insisted. I held Adam to my breast and watched his open eyes looking at me. He seemed to be saying,
Don’t say a word, Mom.
“Rustic paradise. Spacious yet cozy four-bedroom treehouse in the splendid woods of the Berkshires. Charmingly quaint while thoroughly modern. Five acres with two guesthouses. Peaceful getaway.” Jack paused and looked at me hopefully. “Let’s just go take a look.”

“Just hop in the car and go to the Berkshires?” I asked, stunned. He nodded.

“Gallery’s closed tomorrow. Let’s make a family weekend of it. We can find a bed and breakfast there and ask locals about the area.” I was silent. “We don’t have to buy anything today. We’re educating ourselves about the market, so we know what’s out there.”

The last time we “educated” ourselves about the real estate market, I wound up in New Jersey. This time would be different, though, Jack promised. “Think about it, Luce,” he pushed. “You don’t like it here, so you’re refusing to look at ways to leave? How much sense does that make?”

“Plenty,” I quipped. “I may not be perfectly suited for Caldwell, but at least I know what I’m getting. It’s close to the city and I know my way around. I’m in a walking group and have my La Leche League meetings.”

“Lucy!” Jack said, laughing with exasperation. “You go to a La Leche League meeting once a month. I’m sure they have a group out there. How long do you think you’re going to be breastfeeding anyway?”

“Listen, I could go another five years, no one there would think a thing of it,” I said, waiting for Jack to laugh.

“Seriously, Luce. This is our dream. Let’s make it happen. I promise you, we won’t buy anything today. We’ll look at one place, that’s all.”

An hour later, we were on the road with a diaper bag packed with wipes, Elmo, diapers, A and D ointment, chew toys, and three changes of clothes. I sat silently as Jack sang along with Adam ‘s
Kid’s Songs
CD and tried not to smile too wide. I glanced out the window and watched the landscape transform itself from sprawling green lawns to freeway to mountain woods.

When we arrived at the property, I got out of the car agape. I’m sure I looked like a character in a horror movie staring at the house oozing blood and shouting “Get out!” Only my shock was not fear. I was simply stunned that this property was an exact replica of the one I’d always envisioned when dreaming of the perfect home. It was the Westerbeke Ranch and St. Mark’s Place rolled into one, and unlike the
Amityville Horror
house, this one beckoned, “Come in.” There’s a scribbling of graffiti in the ladies’ room at Dojo’s I am always haunted by. In Sharpie pen, someone wrote, “Find your home and live there.” I suppose it always struck a nerve with me because I hadn’t. And I didn’t. This house was, without question, my home. “I want this house,” I whispered to Jack as he reached to the car to unstrap Adam from his seat.

He smiled and shifted his eyes as if to tell me I shouldn’t give away my enthusiasm to the realtor. “Don’t you think we should check out the inside?”

We walked into an entryway of natural wood, stone, and an endless expanse of window. It had the feel of ski lodge meets New Age spa with wool area rugs and stone sculptures where water cascaded from one level to the next. On the hallway wall, a collection of wooden string instruments was mounted, from a sitar to an ornately decorated bass. In the common area were clouds of couches and chairs in delicate blue and white gathered around a stone fireplace. The ceilings reached for the sky in a sharp slope with glass windows set into the wooden roof. I walked straight to my office without having to ask directions. And there it was, just as I’d imagined, complete with the bowl of seeds and nuts outside my window. The only thing that was different was that the painting on the framed silk scarf was blue, not dusty rose as I’d imagined. And you know what? I liked it better in blue. It was the first time in my entire life that my reality looked better than my fantasy. Jack followed me in moments later, holding Adam in his baby sling.

“I want this house,” I said, moving toward him urgently. He laughed, delighted, but hushed me for the sake of bargaining power. “Jack, I’m not kidding, I want this house.”

“I’m glad you like it,” he said, smiling.

“I don’t like it, I love it. I don’t think you understand, Jack. This is my home and I want to live in it. Get me this house.”

The more we toured the main house and the property, the more convinced I was that this was my home. Mentally, I started moving our things in, figuring out which paintings would look best where, and whether or not I could write the blue flower print into the offer. There was a large greenhouse in the back that Jack wanted to use as a painting studio. The guesthouses were small, but just attractive enough to entice a starving artist to come and stay in it for free for a year.

“Could we build more guest houses in the future?” Jack asked the realtor.

The middle-aged woman with long gray hair and a wool poncho nodded, knowing she had buyers. What she had, unfortunately, were not buyers, but dreamers. When Jack and I returned to Caldwell that night, we took a long, hard look at our finances to see how we could swing buying the four-million-dollar property. God knows, it seemed like a stretch. We hadn’t even furnished our place in Caldwell, but Jack seemed to think that with the sale of his gallery, the appreciation on the house, and a full cash-out of both of our retirement plans, we could do it. We stayed up until one in the morning punching numbers into a calculator like a gambler rolling dice in Las Vegas. I felt as though I should be in a sequined mini-dress, blowing a Bazooka bubble, encouraging, “Come on, baby! You can do it, big guy.” Each time Jack would come up with a new idea, he’d frantically press his pencil eraser on to the calculator buttons, then eagerly await the total. The result was always the same. Jack’s broad shoulders deflated and he’d sigh. In our best case scenario, we still came up a million dollars short. And, as Jack explained, banks weren’t exactly keen on the idea of lending money for a non-revenue-generating arts community.

“How would we pay the loan, Luce?” Jack reminded me. “If I’m painting and you’re writing, we can’t pay a mortgage.”

“Jack!” I shouted, almost waking Adam, still sleeping in his portable car seat. “This has to work. That’s my home. I’ve found my home, now I want to live in it.”

Chapter 35

“Have you tried chanting in front of the house? “ Anjoli asked when I told her of our million-dollar shortfall.
“Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,”
she repeated a few times. “Tina Turner swears by it, darling. Didn’t you see her movie,
What’s Love Got to
Do
With It?”
Upon hearing this, Aunt Bernice added that she too enjoyed
Love Doesn’t Have Much to
Do
With Anything.

“It means, I bow to the God within,” Anjoli explained.

“Oh,” I said, unimpressed. “What’s the chant for ‘I want this freakin’ house?’”

“How do you think the universe will respond to your calling it a freaking house? Will it think you deserve this home that you curse, darling?”

Bernice and Anjoli had returned from their shiva cruise and came to Caldwell for lunch. I invited Candace to join us, but she was at a weekend class learning how to be a La Leche League leader. She’d started her course work in June, she said. I felt guilty for not keeping in better touch with her over the summer, and promised I’d strive to be as good a friend to her as she’d been to me. Candace was one of the truly pure-hearted people in the world. Over the months, we had witnessed mothers at their lowest. One mother was so exhausted that when she showed up at the July La Leche League meeting, she walked straight into the sliding glass door, despite the fact that it was fully decked out with butterfly stickers. Candace never laughed. She insisted on driving the woman home, saying she would never allow a mother to drive while overtired. Whenever a mother had a new baby, Candace was always the one e-mailing a meal drop-off schedule. Sometimes she’d call just to ask if there was anything I needed. Me, with my one child. At first her generosity made me feel inadequate at first. Now, I just felt lucky to have her as a friend.

Jack brought a large shrimp salad to the table and placed it in the center so we could serve ourselves. Bernice reached her tanned arms toward the serving tongs and placed leaves on one of our new aqua-blue glass plates.

“How was the cruise?” Jack asked them.

“Very refreshing,” Bernice said, smiling. “Lots of people crying, of course, but once you get used to it, it was sort of like background noise.”

“I found it very disconcerting,” Anjoli chimed in after delicately placing a forkful of spring greens into her lacquered mouth. “It was as though the only thing these people were focused on was their own loss, their own grief.” Jack shot me a look as if to ask if that wasn’t the whole point of a mourning period. “Frankly, I found the whole thing troublingly self-centered. I lost my husband. I lost my brother. Me, me, me. What about the people who made the transition? Do they even bother thinking about
them?”

“Made the transition?” Jack asked.

“Died,” Bernice clarified.

“Oh.”

“I think they
are
thinking about their loved one, though, Anjoli,” I said. “They’re thinking about how much they’ll miss that person.”

“That’s my point entirely, darling! It’s all about them and their loss. Why not rejoice that when a human sheds its body and makes the transition to the spirit plane, they are at total peace. Instead of focusing on their loss—which locks a person into lack consciousness anyway—why not celebrate the fact that their husband or wife is now in euphoria?”

“Maybe because it’s not a fact,” Jack added.

Anjoli sat straight. “Oh, but it is, though. They say the other side is like having an eternal orgasm.”

Oy.

“Who
says this?” Jack asked. “The people who send postcards back from the other side? ‘Wish you were here. It’s one big orgasm.’”

“No, no, I’ve got it,” I piped in. “You’ll be so happy this is where you’re
coming.
You’ll understand soon enough. Wink, wink.”

Bernice laughed as Adam amused himself jumping in a bouncing duck that hung from a doorframe. This hand-me-down from Candace was a lifesaver. He found hours of amusement not just springing about, but looking up and trying to figure out how the crazy contraption worked. “Laugh if you want, but the completely self-indulgent mind-set of these mourners got me thinking of a way I could help,” Anjoli said. Sometimes I am too hard on Anjoli. Sure, she has flaky ideas about life—and death - but deep down she truly cares about people. “I go to enough workshops to know what people go for, and I’ve got a winner. I’m going to lead a workshop that helps people move beyond the selfishness of grieving and focus on how truly blessed their loved one really is now. I’m going to call it ‘Good Mourning.’ Don’t you love it? I may even write a book. My friend Chris is a literary agent and said it was, and I quote, ‘quite a concept.’”

My mother is going to write a book?!

My mother is going to teach a class on how to be less self-centered?!

My mother is going to tell people that they shouldn’t grieve? That a ninety-year-old woman should just get over it and be happy that her lifelong husband is now jizzing with a dead Playboy bunny!

And you know what the worst part of this will be? That Anjoli—the maid of honor at my cousin’s wedding to her self—will be wildly successful. People will flock to her seminars, and wait hours in a line to speak with her. When they finally get to speak to her, they’ll weep with gratitude and tell her how she changed their lives. They will look to her as the Maharishi of Selflessness. Within a year, she’ll fly first class around the globe, kissing orphans and spouting pearls of wisdom, like “Don’t worry, Mommy and Daddy are having one big orgasm in the sky.” Anjoli will even have stalkers, which I’m sure she’ll love. She’ll claim that she’s too selfless to get restraining orders against them, and that they have every right to send her sacrificial samples of their flesh.

“Mother,” I said tersely. “What is wrong with people mourning the loss of a person they loved?”

“It’s selfish,” she said, smugly wiping the corner of her mouth with a napkin.

“So what? Maybe you’re right that a person dies and goes to Plato’s Retreat. Who knows, maybe you’re right,” I said, glancing at Jack who was smirking. “Maybe death is the fabulous adventure camp you say it is. Still, isn’t a person entitled to grieve for her own loss?! What would your friend Louise Hay say about suppressing grief? I mean if not expressing anger causes cancer, and possibly wrinkles, wouldn’t it stand to reason that suppressing any emotion would carry some dire health consequences?”

“I think Lucy has a point,” Bernice said, coming to my aid. Jack continued eating, his head following the conversation like a tennis match. “Who was it that said half the value of theatre was catharsis?”

“I think it was the Germans,” Jack offered.

“It wasn’t the Germans, you moron!” she snapped, then apologized for name-calling.

“Ever since Rita died, she’s been adopting her mannerisms and speech,” Anjoli explained.

“Oh my God!” I gasped. “Mother, why haven’t you mentioned this before? “

“Don’t make such a fuss,” Bernice assured. “I told you, I like to pretend Rita’s still with us, so I try to think of what she would say if she were here. Most of the time, I keep it to myself and Rita and I have a private little joke, which believe me we had plenty of when she was alive. But every once in a while, I slip. Whenever I feel she would’ve wanted me to say something, whenever I feel I can bring her into the conversation, I like to. And when I heard Jack say it was the
Germans
who thought up catharsis, I nearly choked. You know it wasn’t the Germans, don’t you, Jack?”