White Hot Grief Parade Read online

  Or about my period, which came at the age of twelve. I hid all evidence of it from my parents for a year with the kind of frantic desperation of an ancient Bedouin girl who doesn’t want to be married off to a neighboring tribe the moment she is fertile.

  I did not want to grow up. And if I had no choice in the matter, than I certainly was not going to do it with their help.

  The Jehovah’s Witness

  “Gone? You think he’s gone?! That’s the whole point! He’s never gone!”

  — What About Bob?

  (At rise: AL is at home sometime during Month One of the Aftermath. The doorbell rings. It is getting colder as October churns onward; leaves are falling, and nights are drawing in. Alone, in pajamas and glasses that AL cannot remember changing in or out of. She answers it and her stomach flinches. This is not happening. Oh, but it is.)

  AL: Hi.

  JEHOVAH’S WITNESS: Good morning!

  AL: (under her breath) Not really . . .

  JW: Have you heard of Jesus Christ?

  AL: . . . I’ve . . . read his book.

  JW: (Looking AL up and down, assessing her age; He is confused.) Wait. Why aren’t you in school?

  AL: My dad is dead.

  JW: (unfazed) But you are a teenager.

  AL: In college.

  JW: Then why aren’t you in college?

  AL: I’m taking some time off.

  JW: Why?

  AL: Because my dad is dead.

  (AL wants to say, “No, Sir, I’m at home because I just hate responsibility that much,” but she doesn’t. She awkward-pauses with this man and lets it stew.)

  JW: Would you like to see your father again?

  AL: Is this a joke?

  JW: No! (Joyfully) You can see your father again if you give your soul over to Jesus Christ! Here, see the drawing in this pamphlet?

  (Pause. AL inspects the pamphlet. It is the kind of drawing you see in cheap children’s magazines at the pediatrician’s office—children running towards the elderly in a perfect, sunny, Dr. Seuss-like field of heavenly bliss.)

  AL: Um, you need to go.

  JW: May I come in?

  (AL shrugs her shoulders.)

  AL: You know what? Sure.

  (The JW does the whole speech. He stands up, acts stuff out. He is impassioned and expressive and sort of beautiful without being the kind of desperate one might expect. But AL just sits there in her week-old clothes, numb, no will of her own to stop it. Finally, it ends.)

  JW: So, do you have any questions?

  AL: Yes. (For a second, she considers asking him if he would like to hear a knock knock joke, but thinks better of it. These are not the people you start knock knock jokes with.) Does it feel good?

  JW: (taken aback) I’m sorry?

  AL: To have done the whole speech?

  JW: What do you mean?

  AL: You must not ever be able to get the whole thing out; so many people slam doors in your faces. I mean you are . . . well, you are like the original telemarketers. Does it feel good to have done the whole thing?

  (JW stares at AL. There is a part of him that sees he cannot hide from her—a young person so raw they are incapable of judgment either passed or received, and he looks, for an instant, uneasy. But this quickly fades as he sees the humor and truth in her question. This man is a Jehovah’s Witness, but he is also her neighbor, and there is a part of him that is so gentle and well meaning it breaks her heart. The JW smiles and all his theatricality wanes.)

  JW: It does, you know.

  AL: What?

  JW: Feel good.

  AL: Good.

  JW: Thank you.

  AL: Thank you.

  (They smile at one another.)

  AL: But now you probably should go.

  JW: OK.

  (He’ll be fine. He will always have his friends at the Kingdom Hall.)

  Another Letter from Kent

  Follansbee Dairy Farm

  Sutton, New Hampshire

  November 10, 2001

  Dearest Love,

  I’ve finally just received your first letter since our parting. That may be the only negative thing about my coming to you; no long distance loving. As usual, your letter melted me. All your wonderful cadences are tantalizingly hinted at when you write. It’s wonderful. And I love that little drawing of course. It seems strange to me how sure I am that I could spend the rest of my life with you. But it’s true, isn’t it. We’ve already spent a month living together, and I have no worries about the time to come, only excitement and anticipation.

  I’ve thought about next year, the school decision. Previously I refused to factor you into the equation, thinking it would bias the decision. But I’ve come to realize that not only do I want to be with you, but I won’t live without you. I don’t know how it will pan out practically, but I don’t see how we could function so far apart. Think of our possible just-us life: we’d have all our books, our own bed. And if we went to the same school, we’d get to work together again. That’d be very nice.

  Perhaps I’m getting a bit premature. But you should know that I think about our life together. We do seem to inspire one another. I hope, even though it seems fantastical at times that we can be close next year. I don’t think I could handle the distance very well. And there’s really no call for it, so why go through all the trouble?

  I’m looking forward to my trip west. I’m going home to pick up my stuff, then my dad and I are driving to Cincinnati. It has the potential to be a very healthy time for us. I always feel like we both try so hard to connect, but we keep missing the mark. I want to tell him about you, about us, about how we are together. I realized just a few days ago that if my father were to die now, I would be left with an unbearable regret. And now is the time to make things right with him. I’m confident that it will happen.

  I’m getting to be quite a handy man here on the farm. Let’s see, I fixed the Volvo muffler, the rear lights, installed new windows in the store room, fixed some leaky pipes, built some sheep feeders (I’m quite proud of those), installed some equipment in the greenhouse—the list just goes on! All this problem solving is really quite fun. And useful information for, say, a husband to have.

  I can’t wait for all the wonderful things we’ll fill our days with when we’re together again. I just love going to the theater. The opera, of course. You’re such a stimulating person to experience life with; a great date. I definitely want to commence our Shakespeare reading. Perhaps Henry IV; you know I prefer the histories.

  Well, my love, I’ll say goodnight once more. Fortunately, I can look forward to sweet dreams of you.

  Always Yours,

  Kent

  So, the Story about

  My Parents Goes Like This . . .

  During the summer of 1976, my parents met on an airplane in Spain.

  It was the summer of the Montreal Olympics and of the American Bicentennial, and in one of those classic (almost unbelievable) love stories, both my parents were on individual trips to Europe to heal themselves— Cathy from a not-quite-right young marriage, Michael from a painful divorce involving a very young son, as well as a generally existential midlife moment.

  Twenty-seven-year-old Cathy’s parents were living in Barcelona, and her summer spent with them was more than merely an opportunity to earn graduate credits; it served as a simultaneous escape from her painfully ill-fated marriage to Dennis.

  Ah, Dennis. Now, I have never met Dennis, but he exists in my life as a legend, the same as those stories about Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen or the existence of the Yeti. While undergrads at California Polytechnic University (AKA Cal Poly) in the late 1960s, Dennis and Cathy had been introduced by a mutual friend named Kay Jacobs. Dennis was a basketball star and Cathy’s first real love. They courted, dated, fell in love, fell out, broke up, and fell back in—all of which culminated in Cathy concluding, “If it hurts this much it must be love.” This ultimately led to their marriage. It was a romance of operatic overtures. My
mom once told me that he was the first man she ever slept with, and, with her upbringing, she thought she had to marry him.

  Shortly after their marriage, a calamitous injury befell Dennis, preventing him from ever playing basketball again. Dennis limped all six foot eight inches of himself into the popular “nouveau Eastern thought” movement of the era, and he lit incense, began meditating, and practicing free love. He took a vow of celibacy that seemed to be applicable only to his wife. It wasn’t the ideal set-up for a new marriage.

  Dennis insisted that the problems in their marriage were hers. Cathy was “unenlightened,” he said. She was “cramping his style.” And, from Cathy’s perspective, she didn’t mean to be uncooperative—it’s just that she kept coming home to a house full of incense to find Dennis naked in bed feeding fruit to their neighbors. It was somewhat awkward.

  Cathy tried to chant, to dissolve her ego, to meditate, to “get on board” in the lotus position—all to no avail. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t do it—it was not who she was, and this new, experimental Dennis was simply not the man she had married.

  “Do you even love me?” Cathy would ask.

  “I’m still here, aren’t I?” Dennis would reply.

  Then, in the summer of 1976, Cathy found Dennis in bed with Kay Jacobs. That was it. Cathy left and joined Delalberto and Florence (after Cathy left her biological mother’s custody, she always referred to Florence as her mother, and to them collectively as her parents) in Barcelona.

  When late August arrived—and, with it, the end of her visit—Cathy’s parents drove her to the airport. They had not discussed her turmoil once the entire summer. She burst into tears in her mother’s arms. She wept while Florence held her and dried her tears. Then she told Cathy, “You will never leave him unless you truly believe you can love someone else.”

  They would turn out to be prophetic words.

  Meanwhile, Michael was on vacation in Europe. His workmates had insisted upon it. Michael never really wanted to be a lawyer, but he was a hero to his colleagues, and a nasty divorce from a first wife he later admitted he’d married out of sheer “I’m-thirty-one-and-not-married” panic combined with a painfully difficult situation with their very young son had all taken its toll. His coworkers at the law office had insisted he “get out of town.” So he had.

  He had gone to Barcelona and then his intended journey on to Paris was foiled when, for no other reason than perpetually unreliable trains, the train to Paris had been cancelled. So he decided to cut his losses in Barcelona and head home early.

  But he was late for his flight. Searching for the gate, he put his bags down on the ground to get his bearings—and it was then that he saw it: two women, a mother comforting a daughter in tears. Beautiful . . . he thought before the final boarding for the flight was called and he promptly flew to the gate.

  Incredible, yes? But they did not meet there.

  They met on the airplane after the flight from Barcelona landed in Madrid.

  Michael (a man who always got up to disembark before the plane even touched the ground) passed Catherine (the woman who always waited until everyone was off the plane) and stopped dead. It was the beautiful, tearful woman from the airport. He spluttered, his tongue turned to lead. Unable to speak, he feebly “after-you” hand gestured to the beautiful woman, who was even more beautiful than he had realized from afar.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m just going to stay here until everyone is off the plane.”

  He stood still, staring at the beautiful woman who was reading a book to pass the time, a sea of angry Europeans screaming behind him. Still unable to speak, he did the gesture again.

  Cathy, starring at the impossibly gorgeous, European-looking man repeated, “No, thank you,” she said slowly again, raising her voice as if that would help. “I am going to stay here until everyone is off the plane.”

  “Oh,” he spluttered. “I’m really sorry to have spoiled your plans . . . ”

  Michael couldn’t believe the lameness of his response, but Catherine found this man so earnest, so charming, and his response so delightfully sweet that she burst out laughing and she did indeed get off the plane.

  They never could have guessed that they were both headed to San Francisco, where they lived just a few miles apart. They never could have imagined that they would spend the remainder of that twenty-hour journey westward seated beside one another, slowly falling in love in the airports, on the planes, both speaking their innermost truths for the first time in their lives. But that’s exactly what happened.

  Just before the plane landed, Michael got nervous.

  “Look, Cathy. I can’t believe I am saying this but I . . . am in love with you. And I would never want to be responsible for a marriage breaking apart,” he said. “But here is my business card. If I don’t hear from you in six months, call just to tell me how you are doing.”

  Cathy burst into tears as Michael distanced himself from this beguiling, miserably married woman, and, in an act of restraint and honor, changed seats for the last hour of the journey, so profoundly in love with her was he.

  When they got off the plane, they went their separate ways. But Catherine already knew she would see him again. Her mother’s words rang out to her like a prophecy.

  At the airport, Cathy was greeted by Dennis and Kay Jacobs, who told her they were leaving the next morning to meditate in the desert for eight weeks.

  “Fine,” Catherine conceded, because, finally, it was.

  Cathy returned home, and Dennis and Kay did indeed leave the following morning. In the wake of their departure, Cathy looked over the brand new condo on the cliffs of Santa Cruz that she had shared with her brand new husband, then went to her wallet, and took out Michael Silber’s business card.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning. She picked up the phone and dialed the number. As it was ringing she panicked, thinking, What if he doesn’t remember me? But before she could hesitate, he answered the phone.

  “Buenos días,” she said, her voice shaking but sure. “Are you still in love?”

  “Oh,” he sighed. “You bet.”

  She drove her red vintage 240Z to Michael’s office in her best outfit, she was buzzed in by the secretary, and entered the office.

  There was kissing. There were fireworks.

  That weekend was a flurry of love, Northern California activities, and introductions to every single person Michael knew. When the weekend was over, he turned to her and asked, “So are you moving in? Are we getting married or what?”

  He smiled. He was absolutely sincere. So she trusted him.

  And that was that. The rest is history.

  You know, whenever I tell that story, people are speechless. They don’t believe it. They say it sounds like a movie script. But it is real. It happened. These things do. Happen.

  Years ago, on the twentieth anniversary of that fateful plane journey, the three of us went out to dinner and I first heard the “airplane story”— told with all the fully explored emotions, the little details, the kiss they shared. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the looks on their faces as they told me the story and relived the memories.

  “Her voice was. . . like a bell,” my father said. “I just couldn’t stop listening to her, and to every single thing she had to say.”

  Mom blushed, smiling at him.

  It would take me many years to truly understand the nature of what my mother lost.

  Big Trash Day

  Iwas the night before “big trash” day—the day you put out your larger items on the curb for it to be carted away to the undiscovered country.

  Last month’s initial purge had been like grief Viagra—we were on a roll. Redoing the house, beginning with the upstairs, had become the largest chunk of our daily activities.

  Some of it was marvelous. The strong scent of paint filled the house, its acidic odor burning off the smells of disease, and the windows flew open, washing the place clean with the freshness and on
coming frosts of November in the air.

  But other parts were not marvelous at all.

  This night, I sat at the curb, my body unfathomably fatigued; it was all I could do to remain awake. My back and every muscle were sore, my head dense with dulling fog, even my breasts were tender and aching. The steady rain upon the street, rooftops, and curb fell upon me too as I sat in a ball in the seat of my father’s black leather swivel chair—the noisy, worn out chair that had lived in his office. It was the one my mother had always hated, the one I associated with the sound of his IBM typewriter, that still smelled of him and held the unmistakable imprint of his body. I sat, feeling that imprint left upon the worn leather, soaked to the bone in the freezing rain. I would stay there all night.

  The memories began to flash.

  I am thirteen and sitting on the bed with Dad, frustrated beyond all reason by my homework for Eighth Grade Money Management class. I do not understand money or how to manage it, and, despite my sulky attitude, he is very slowly explaining everything with great patience until I absolutely do. Only a few years back, we sat in the very same positions reading the Chronicles of Narnia, and now I am being asked to manage money like an adult and I do not want to grow up. But most of all I do not want to disappoint him.

  It is Thanksgiving 1998 and it feels as though everyone in town (and several friends from out of town), are at 1367 gathered around our piano singing show tunes—duets and solos, until finally we all erupt in an emotional chorus of the Act 1 finale of Ragtime, my father’s eyes closed, his voice the strongest and most impassioned of us all.

  I am fourteen and driving to Groves High School with Dad, just as we have driven to every school, every single morning, since time began. He pulls up right in front of the back entrance on Evergreen Road. We hug, I kiss him on the cheek, and we exchange “I love yous” before I grab my purple backpack and run inside. Before heading inside I catch the eye of Sarah Radke, a girl two classes ahead of me whom I’ve known since the summer before we moved to Michigan. She’s getting out of the car driven by her father, whom I smile and wave to. Mr. Radke’s face looks thoughtful as I make my way inside. I will learn a few years later how much watching the Silbers say goodbye at the school entrance means to him. I’ll come to learn that when he’s having particular trouble with Sarah, that he will say, “You know how Al and Michael Silber say goodbye to one another every morning? If you could ever do that for me—just once—it would mean the world to me.” I will learn, years later (when Mr. Radke also dies prematurely, in his case from pancreatic cancer), that Sarah will listen. It will, in its own small way, change a little piece of their relationship.