The Sixteenth of June (2 page)

Two

N
ora reclines on the couch, her hands crossed over her stomach. She tries not to think about how she must look with her head propped on the pillow. Hannah Portman was probably being arranged into a similar pose at that moment.

“I think it's the wrong one who's gone, if you want to know the truth.” Her voice sounds shaky. Starting is always the hardest part. But she is here to air her most toxic thoughts, to let them out. “If there were any justice in the world, it would have been him. Instead there he is, alive and kicking, never an illness of any kind. Though he likes to complain enough.”

Her heart is at a trot and she breathes to steady it. “My dad thinks they're snooty. Leo's parents, I mean. When he first heard about the annual party, he just about fell over laughing. But my mom—I think she understood. The thing about Michael and June is that they have these rules. And, yeah, June comes down hard on people who never got the manual. But no one in that house ever yells. There's something to be said for that.

“I'm supposed to be doing more with my life. It's what my dad says. ‘Got into Yale, and for what? All that debt, for what?' But I'm the one with the student loans. It's not like they're his problem.

“I get it from other people, too, even if they don't come out and say it. Like my program director.” Although, in a way, he'd said exactly that. “You were not born to be a teacher,” he told her crossly at graduation. “Why are you throwing your talent away?”

“Stephen, too. It's obvious he hopes I'll go back to opera. He'll be embarrassed for me when I get introduced around today. Almost thirty, giving voice lessons. A lounge singer.

“Meanwhile, Stephen has this total attitude with teaching. He calls his students morons. He thinks his parents are pretentious, but who is he to call anyone a snob? Why begrudge people their hobbies?” She feels where her thoughts want to take her, the justifications and rationalizing. Pulling your hair out isn't normal, she knows. It's no hobby.

“With today . . . it annoys me, I guess, that I'm so aware of it. Everyone else at the service will be thinking about their own shit. How they need to go to the supermarket, the emails they need to write. And I envy them. They don't get what a luxury that is, to be bored at a funeral.

“My mom's funeral wasn't exactly official. We had people over to the house, like a morose party.” Nora thinks back to that afternoon, neighbors milling about the living room. “We should've done something nicer. But my dad—” He told Nora about the arrangements before she could object. “Those funeral homes cost a fortune,” he grumbled, and she was too exhausted to fight him. “My dad had the last say. So there wasn't even a eulogy.” There was only the cardboard box of ashes sitting unceremoniously on the coffee table. The box was long and rectangular, as if it might be holding a pair of boots.

Nora lifted the cover after everyone left. The ashes were coarser than she expected, gritty and uneven. The lack of uniformity alarmed her. She touched one of the shards through the clear, thick plastic and felt a strange urge to pocket it. She replaced the lid hurriedly, appalled by her own desire.

“So today, it's not like it's the same. I didn't really know Leo and Stephen's grandmother. I saw her at Delancey a couple of times. I swear the woman never said a word. She just sat there. I once told Stephen it was like she'd been taxidermied. He got so mad at me—maybe the maddest I've ever seen him.

“Anyway, it's not like today dredges up all these
memories
. It's not like I'm going to stand there and have it all come flooding back. Part of me is curious to see what a real funeral is like. I'm sure Michael and June shelled out for it. And I've never been to a synagogue before.” Nora frowns. Will there even be a burial? It's what she has been picturing, a stately cemetery scene, but suddenly she isn't sure. She should ask Leo, though he might not know. Only Stephen had converted.

“I couldn't sleep last night, so it must be on my mind.” Couldn't sleep and had pulled, but she doesn't say it. “The thing I can't figure out is if it really bothers me or if it's just
supposed
to bother me. There are these times when her being gone comes up for real.” Like when Leo had proposed. Nora couldn't call the one person she most wanted to tell; she didn't want to call the one person she had left. “But there are other times where it comes up in a fake way. Like I'm supposed to be thinking about it. Like it's my duty.

“It's not that I imagine her doing all these mother/daughter things with me. I don't know that she would've taken me wedding dress shopping, for example. That wasn't like her.” Nora pictures her mom at the kitchen table with the bills and the mail, stapling things, highlighting things, an office manager to her core. She would tap the papers when she was finished, the corners perfectly aligned.

“Grandma Portman died suddenly. She was old, but it happened fast. And I wonder what that's like.” Nora's eyes roam the ceiling. There is a pattern, fifth tile up, second across: a woman in profile. If she stares at the tile long enough, her face comes into focus—the hook of her nose, the broad plane of her forehead.

“They used to call it a nadir,” she remembers. “After a course of chemo, the cell counts would dip. That was the medical term for it. I kept waiting for someone to be like, ‘I know, I know, poor choice of words.' Like it isn't bad enough you're going through this awful period, but then they have to come out and call it that? It's like if they were to call chemo ‘suffering.' Or cancer ‘that sucky thing.' ‘What does she have?' ‘Oh, that sucky thing of the liver. But we're treating it with suffering.' And the worst part is, soon enough, you're nodding along. Because you've forgotten that the word once meant anything else. You forget the nadir isn't temporary. It's now your whole life.

“I guess you can't go through all of that without getting used to it. She had so many trips to the ER that we stopped freaking out. How awful is that? We should have freaked out every time. But that tenth emergency—it can't feel like the first.

“Michael and June got the one phone call. They never had to go through what I did. My mom got diagnosed my sophomore year. That's, what? Seven years of phone calls.”

Nora shakes her head. “I guess, at a certain point, my mom and I sort of drifted apart. Leo and I had that amazing summer together. It seems so ridiculous that I did that. She'd just been diagnosed. There I was, gallivanting around—” She stops. It's what her dad would say. “There you go, gallivanting around! A selfish girl.” “The truth is that it was hard to be around her. She used to joke that cancer was like a mistress. I didn't know what she meant, but maybe now I do. She couldn't be with her kid with the mistress in town.

“I stopped knowing how to hang out with her. I didn't know how to
be
. I tried to make myself useful. I took her to chemo a few times, but she didn't like anyone else driving her car. ‘I have those mirrors set just right,' she'd say. Then we'd get there and she'd sit in her chair with her magazines. She never wanted ice chips or a blanket—she got annoyed if you offered. So I just stood there, not knowing what to do, feeling like I was in the way.

“The stuff she complained about was minor. There was this nurse she thought was rude, this black woman with long fingernails. I hated it when she complained about her. I thought it was racist. ‘Those damn fingernails,' she'd say. ‘It can't be hygienic.' ‘Cut it out, Mom,' I'd tell her.

“Maybe I was preparing myself for it. I don't know. Maybe I latched onto Leo and his family because I knew what was coming. Maybe that's why no one talked to Grandma Portman. Maybe you disengage without realizing it because some part of you knows.”

Nora nods at the ceiling, sees the words before her, the truth of them. “Everyone thinks the past is the nightmare, that I just need to wake up from it. But the past isn't the nightmare at all. It's the present that threatens to consume you. Because at least in the past I had her.

“I don't know what to do with myself. Every day, I have this feeling of not knowing what to do.” Nora stops, swallows. “It feels like I'm in a swimming pool filled with tar, with a three-hundred-pound backpack on. It takes everything I have just to stay afloat. And I don't know if that's okay. Do you fake it more? Fake it less? Does ‘fake it till you make it' work?”

Her fingers find the couch beneath her and probe its surface.

“Then there's the wedding. It's always
there
. Even at the funeral today—a funeral, of all places. Everyone will look at the ring and ask if I have a dress.” Nora bites the hard ridge of her cuticle. She feels a sharp peal of pain as it separates that isn't altogether unpleasant.

“I guess the whole time she was sick, I fooled myself. You tell yourself these things, like, ‘Oh, it's not
cancer
cancer.' What does that even mean? And you see her not looking great, but she looks that way for months. So you forget that she once looked any different.

“Meanwhile, there's the hospital stuff around the house—the beige water pitcher, the pink kidney-bean thing. You hate that stuff, but it comes in handy. Maybe that's a mistake. Maybe you should never let the kidney-bean thing into your home in the first place.

“I still try and fake myself out. Like I'll put off paying my credit card bill—which used to drive her nuts—so that, for a second, I can hear her getting upset about it. ‘You paid your MasterCard bill yet? It's the second already! You can't leave it till the grace period, Nora.' I do these things to bring her voice back for just a minute.

“Anyway. The time it hit me, I think for real, was when I went to call her. I want to say it was the night of her funeral, but I could be wrong. It might have been the next day. Those first few days were a blur. But here's what's funny: I picked up the phone because I wanted to tell her about how weird the funeral had been. That's what was running through my head.

“I was in the middle of dialing when I stopped. It's like that feeling people talk about with phantom limbs: that used to be there, but it's not anymore. Like a tickle from what's gone.

“And later, I think a few hours later, I dialed anyway. I guess I wanted to see what would happen. Like there was a chance I'd imagined it all. And before I could confirm it by looking around the room and seeing the flowers or my dress, I dialed.

“I heard it ringing on my end. Doesn't that mean it has to be ringing somewhere else? I never found out what happened to her stuff—her cell phone, her purse. I imagined her phone lighting up. And it seemed, for just a minute, that someone would answer. That someone would have to.

“It rang and rang. I didn't even get to hear her voice. She was one of those people who never recorded a message. Thought it was silly. So there was just that automated one. You know, where it goes, ‘Hello. Please leave a message after the tone.' That was when I realized: from now on, I'd be talking into space.”

Three

S
tephen wonders if he is supposed to bring a date.

It hasn't occurred to him until now, standing on the train platform, his umbrella aloft. Surely it is a foolish concern, one his grandmother would have batted away, but new couples have been cropping up everywhere. Getting coffee, doing laundry, crossing streets. Errands and tasks that hardly necessitated company were no longer being done solo. “Stephen!” his friends chirped, looking up brightly from their lattes and shared laundry stacks.

He knows to expect it at the party tonight. “Anyone special these days?” they will ask, elbowing him. But it dawns on him that he'll probably get some jabs at the funeral too. “A handsome guy like you,” they will say, frowning. “Isn't there anyone in that department of yours?”

Until recently, dating had felt like a casual game of musical chairs. If you sat for a moment, it was only to get up again. But then the pace had quickened, his friends scurrying to grab their seats. And then not budging, evading his glance. Stephen was the last man standing. “Well, of course we've all been playing,” they seemed to say from a seated repose, Leo and Nora studiously looking away. “Didn't you know?”

The spring issue of the Yale alumni magazine, which he had flipped through last night in a fit of insomnia, confirmed that this was not the work of his imagination. There were the weddings, not tucked away at the end of the class notes, but right up front for all to see. Fellow alumni in attendance were dutifully listed, the names, nestled between commas, like ducks waddling in a row.

He recognized some. Their names looked strangely official now, as if they bore no relationship to the classmates who had barfed into bushes and staggered home from strange beds at dawn, who had skipped 11:00 a.m. classes because they were too
early
.

Any subsequent nonmatrimonial updates, on the heels of such ceremony, felt lacking. He scanned the notes hopefully for word of some exotic exploit: a kooky fellowship in Vienna, a Peace Corps update from Nepal. Perhaps a documentary filmmaker mucking about in Sudan, or even an athletic triumph to confer glory (a classmate had been drafted by a professional soccer team a few years ago and there had been a stir). But if there was any mention of quirky adventure, it was alluded to in the past tense: “After a brief stint running a microbrewery in Portland, Paul Yu is in his first year of medical school at Columbia.” People, the class notes informed you, were growing up. Paul Yu had come to his senses.

Stephen had sighed and put the magazine down. He used to take pleasure in the class notes, sometimes reading them right by the mailbox. People were backpacking through Thailand, mountaineering in Chile, and he could picture them in their jewel-toned parkas. Some had consulting jobs; others were pursuing musical theater or teaching English in Japan. It all felt transient and silly, like playing dress-up.

If his own situation felt a little less adventuresome, it was mitigated by what he read. He couldn't contribute stories of building wells in Nigeria, but he could joke about his unwashed roommate, Andres, who smelled permanently of wet wool and goat, or his Marxist professor who decided to conduct an experiment of the proletariat by having his students grade themselves. These were the ridiculous tales of being twenty-two and twenty-five, of being in that happy, malleable phase of postcollege life before everything set in the gray cement of adulthood.

True, he was a little more mired than his friends, ankle deep while they went globe-trotting and job-hopping, but he didn't mind. Indeed, he took pride in it. He was the only one he knew who had gone straight to grad school from college, even using the summer after graduating to take intensive German.

His ego (
das Ich!
) rallied around his work ethic. He was the most on track of his classmates back then, and he felt the pure certainty of an evangelical Christian politely declining booze and drugs. Poking his head out from his cave in the quarterly glimpse afforded by the class notes, he would return to his studies feeling gratified.

And when he occasionally attended an alumni event, the
Yale Connect!
postcards coaxing him out, he saw his success reflected in their faces. “You're in a PhD program?” they would ask resentfully. “And you're in your third year already?” He would feign embarrassment, nod at the floor.

He had been impressive for a solid stint there, a postcollege golden era. But then news of grad school acceptances started trickling in. Someone had gotten into Princeton, he would see with a frown, and he had to soothe himself with reminders that he was in his fourth year, coursework completed. (“I got an incredibly generous offer from Penn,” he imagined himself saying to the Princeton snot, with the barest suggestion that he'd been lured away from Harvard.)

Then he was in his fifth year. And his sixth. Any lead he had felt squandered. How quickly he had gone from being the early bird to the dawdler. “You're already studying for comp exams?” had once been uttered aghast in bars. Now it was a cheerful “Still working on the old diss, eh, Stephen?” with a buck-up tone of pity.

And that was it. The
already
s! had turned into
still
s? The exclamation points, those jealous stabs of hysterical punctuation, had rounded into questioning sneers. It was no wonder he had let the spring issue of the alumni magazine sit untouched. Who needed to see the news trumpeted of more nuptials and neurologists? Their degrees trailed behind them like shoes from a rear bumper. Gone was the playful sense that their activities might be abandoned for more hip pursuits. Paul Yu & Co. were in it for good.

“You are almost thirty now,” his grandmother had observed on Tuesday. She said it wistfully, and Stephen felt caught between the troubling possibilities that she was either reminding herself of this fact, to ground the balloon of her wandering mind, or was reminding him. And so he had held his tongue rather than reply—as he normally would—that he knew his own age perfectly well. He nodded in polite agreement, as he did that whole afternoon.

He shifts his umbrella to the other hand. Gone now.

Just days ago he had stood in her room. Days, hours. How many minutes had it been?

Standing by her bed, he had felt paralyzed, unsure if he should attempt a final good-bye. Would it offend her? Would it diminish her chances? So he had remained mute, not realizing he would regret what he didn't say more than what he did.

She had likely taken his reticence as a sign that the end was near. Michael and June visited that same evening, and he imagines them standing by her bed with bowed heads, deferential at last. In death, you were a victor.

Then there was the place itself. Pine Grove. They probably all have similar names. Shady Oaks. Cypress Point. Maple Valley. Nursing homes and country clubs like to affiliate with trees. But there was a dignity there, the kind of hushed reverence he normally associates with libraries and museums.

“Not too shabby, eh?” Grandma Portman had prodded, watching him take it in when he first visited. It was the week after 9/11. He had decided to check on her after learning that his parents had no intention of visiting.

He lent his grandmother his elbow as they strolled the grounds. He had been expecting a dilapidated building that smelled of antiseptic, threadbare common rooms emanating despair, but this was more like college, with its sprawling campus and tennis courts. They stood together on the crest of a gently sloping hill. “It was good of you to come,
bubeleh
,” she said, squeezing his arm. They gazed at the weeping willows, the
IN MEMORIAM
benches beneath. Stephen, touched by how pleased she was to see him, felt bizarrely close to tears.

“God, it's so scary,” Nora had said of the attacks. “I was worried my mom's chemo would get disrupted, with all the chaos at the hospitals.”

“Right,” he replied awkwardly. Nora had tunnel vision. Not even those towers could get her to look up from her mother's sickbed.

It occurred to him, standing on that hill, that he hadn't confided in Nora in weeks. He had fallen into the role of listener. He didn't fault her for being preoccupied with her mother, but selfishly, he missed her. She was becoming less available to him as a friend, and he sensed her fading in some way he couldn't pinpoint.

Meanwhile, his grandmother seemed so delighted to have him there. He remembered her as being stern when he was a boy, but any trace of severity had vanished from her face, softened by age. And then there was the matter of the new head bob.

It was probably involuntary, some sort of neuromuscular twitch. Her head went like a basketball at times: nod nod nod. It must have been uncomfortable, but she said nothing of it. Stephen had come to see her, and that was all that mattered, yes? Her head bounced along in agreement, all the repressed affirmations from a lifetime released at the mere sight of him.

So he walked with her, dutifully following her. Down the hall, through a glass atrium, the corridors drenched in light. He felt a strange sense of familiarity, as though in a dream.

His plan for that visit had been to make a quick escape. He would make sure she was okay and deposit the box of cookies from Metropolitan Bakery. “I have office hours at four,” he had warned her. But sitting there, the grounds stretching past her window in a vista, he found himself settling into his wingback chair. He talked with her about the events of the past week, how angered he was by the politicians and the talking heads. “I was born in New York,” he said. “And here are all these people in Texas and Alabama discussing it like it's their tragedy. Like they're allowed to speak for the victims!” She nodded sagely.

They continued talking, their discussion lightening as the sky grew dark. He told her about teaching, that sea of alien faces smirking at him. How they fidgeted, turning in papers that were a collective atrocity. And this at an Ivy League school! Next he was going on about his committee, the fatiguing levels of ass-kissing its members required. He felt as if he were getting a degree in babysitting, in appeasement, in coddling. “Stephen, don't you have office hours?” she interrupted, glancing at the clock. “No one ever comes anyway,” he replied hastily, reaching for a cookie. He thought he saw a momentary gleam in her eye, but she said nothing, her head bobbing away.

And so what began as a pleasant surprise of a visit, a that-wasn't-so-bad sort of visit, became a routine. He went monthly at first, then a bit more often. Until finally, by the time Leo and Nora got engaged, he was going every Tuesday, a ritual as comforting as attending synagogue.

He told himself he was being a good grandson. Responsible. Slightly heroic, even. But when he purchased his ten-trip ticket at the urine-scented kiosk, he didn't feel the weight of obligation. Grasping that ticket, he felt free.

He looked forward to the meditative rocking of the train. He had come to know its rhythm: the particular place where the electricity might cut out for a moment before surging back; the moment when the train left the rickety tracks of Thirtieth Street and picked up speed. The conductor, punching tickets as he teetered down the aisle, always nodded at him in recognition.

With each stop, the town names rang out overhead:
Chessssssstnut Hill! Noooooorristown!
This bellowing struck Stephen as quaint, a throwback to an era of transport involving steamer trunks and porters. By the time Pine Grove's stop approached, a feeling of goodwill found its way to him and he felt lighter, jauntier.

There was none of that buzz in the air at Pine Grove, the incessant hum of reachability. Around him now, the commuters thumbing their phones seem tethered to some invisible force, as though at any moment the great cord of connectivity might give a tug and yank them off the platform. The
Times
recently ran an article on the growing number of people who check email first thing in the morning. It was a rising demographic, he read. He pictured Leopold scowling at his phone while shuffling to the bathroom in that foul old robe.

It was the sort of thing he could have shared with his grandmother on a typical Tuesday, a normal Tuesday, when he hadn't been informed by phone that she likely only had twenty-four hours left. She would have sighed. “We are becoming half-robots,” she would have said knowingly.

Pine Grove offered him a respite. Each time he walked along the gravel path to its campus, he would be reminded of a leafy sanctuary: college, Central Park. The rush to pair off, to win—it all fell away. No one was in a panic to get to that last chair before the music stopped. No one was in a rush at all.

Today, it is all different: a new train line, a strange set of names clacking on the signboard. Vendors at coffee carts parked along the platform dole out coffee and plastic-wrapped bagels in a steady stream. Accustomed to the station's sleepy noontime calm, Stephen feels unnerved by the harried morning bustle. It occurs to him that he will miss the ritual of his visits as much as he will miss her.

He enters the train after everyone else. The car smells of baked damp, black umbrellas drying at the feet of their owners like small dogs. A heavy spatter hits as the train lurches forward. The weather forecast, following the Bloomsday report, had mentioned the possibility of hail. Stephen takes comfort in this. The skies should darken for Grandma Portman, a terrible morning to atone for their terrible mourning.

She had gone more gently than he would have thought possible. No battles or resuscitating. “As little suffering as we can hope for,” Miriam Maxwell, Pine Grove's director, had told him, and he understood that he was supposed to feel grateful.

“Tickets!” the conductor cries.

It was Miriam who had called him on Tuesday morning. Stephen was groggy when he answered the phone and felt a second behind everything she said. “Twenty-four hours left?” he repeated. “How could you possibly know that?” Yet he registered her calm, the quiet space she gave him on the line, and realized she must make these calls often.