White Hot Grief Parade Read online

  GREY: What do you need me to do?

  AL: Set up some chairs?

  GREY: (Blows his nose.) Who is doing the food?

  AL: You are.

  GREY: Oh Christ. I’ll get on that as soon as I finish sniveling grotesquely.

  (Because of the house’s location along a steep hill, 1367 technically has three levels—the “top floor,” where the private rooms are located; the “upstairs,” which is technically the middle level that contains the kitchen, main living and dining rooms; and the “downstairs” bottom level located below the waterline of the river. This you can see from the more casual sofas in what is known as “the other living room,” which sits beside the guest bedroom with an accompanying half-bath and leads out to the garage. So you see, much of the house is made of only half-levels, with many tiny steps and slants to accommodate the slope of the hill, which cuts through the house diagonally.)

  Like this:

  GREY: OK, I’m just going to put everything in your refrigerator onto your dining room table in so spectacular a design that no one will notice how awful all the donation food is or that Kent and I ate our feelings—AKA all the dessert—last night, while we were ironing everything.

  AL: Great.

  (From this position, you will also note that the top floor is the location of all the bedrooms—the master bedroom as well as AL’s, an office, and a half bath at the top of the stairs. The stairwell walls are practically wallpapered with family photographs from every era and generation.)

  (LILLY enters from the front door.)

  LILLY: Everyone is coming and there is no parking.

  AL: I thought we could park on the street.

  LILLY: The street is full.

  AL: What about our neighbors’ driveways?

  LILLY: The neighbors’ driveways are full.

  AL: How many people can there be?

  LILLY: There were approximately six million people at the funeral. (off AL’s blank expression) Give or take.

  AL: Well people will have to walk, I guess.

  LILLY: Four of the six million attendees were senior citizens.

  AL: Evil ones!

  LILLY: Right, but think of it this way—we can’t have one of them die on the way to your dad’s funeral reception, because it would take the focus away from your dad’s funeral.

  AL: That’s fair.

  LILLY: I also don’t want the police to get suspicious that they had to

  show up to your house more than once this week.

  AL: (considering) Put someone on parking duty. Like valet. Like the two little boys in Father of the Bride.

  LILLY: Oh, I love that part!

  AL: Me too!

  (LILLY exits, dialing her cell phone.)

  (From the doorway, you can also see that the downstairs “other living room” has two long sofas around a small glass coffee table, dotted with extra chairs, all prepared to be sat upon.)

  (CATHERINE enters from the top floor, having changed out of her lavender ball gown and into a simple black dress. She has freshened up her face, pulled back her hair, and is now a vision of quiet resignation and fortitude.)

  CATHERINE: They’re coming.

  (Then a long moment without words. There is a hum of distant cars, soft voices, then the ringing of the doorbell. AL opens the front door. ALL enter. Bedlam. Everyone is talking at once.)

  MRS. SOMETHING-BAUM: And so I said to Edna, “It’s shameful, just shameful how that little shiksa didn’t even mention them and she left it completely to the rabbi.”

  MRS. WHOEVER-WITZ: I know.

  MRS. SOMETHING-BAUM: I mean who raised a child like that? (spotting CATHERINE) Oh, there she is. (hugging) Oh Cathy, so sorry for your loss.

  MR. NOSEY-BACH: Is there a deli platter?

  MRS. NOSEY-BACH: (hard of hearing) Eh?

  MR. NOSEY-BACH: IS THERE FOOD?

  MRS. NOSEY-BACH: EH?!

  (It is becoming evident that all of ALBERT and EDNA SILBER’s elderly friends are settling into the upstairs living room, taking over and seemingly multiplying in the scattered chairs like brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice—while all of the young artsy teenagers are migrating to the downstairs living room. Entirely separate and sealed worlds.)

  (Enter AARON, a delightfully neurotic Woody Allen-esque intellectual with a heart of gold.)

  AARON: Al? Hi. We’re having a little trouble with the people downstairs. The folks don’t have food. And they’re, well, you know, understandably, afraid of going upstairs to the food table.

  AL: (trying to make out his meaning) Are you saying you want me to bring down a platter of meat and cheese and crudités or are you saying you want me to ask the Pharaoh to “let my people go?”

  AARON: (pause). Yes.

  AL: OK. (she calls upstairs) Grey!

  GREY: Yeah?

  AL: Provisions.

  GREY: On it.

  (GREY returns at lightning speed carrying trays of food in his giant arms.)

  AL: Are Rebel Forces gathering?

  GREY: Flying monkeys are circling Mount Doom.

  (AARON, GREY, and AL descend the stairs and place the trays on the coffee table below. Lights up on the separate scenes on the sofas up and downstairs.)

  JESSICA: Part of me thinks this is really nice.

  MICHAEL ARDEN: What do you mean?

  JESSICA: You know, all of us, scattered all over the world, so far away from everyone we love so much in such a unique, Interlochen way, all longing to be back together? And here we are.

  MICHAEL ARDEN: All back together?

  JESSICA: Yeah.

  BIG-HAIRED LADY: (with shoulders padded like a lunatic’s cell) Cathy, I never really “got” Michael, but I’m sorry he’s gone.

  CATHERINE: Thank you?

  (At long last, the SILBERS arrive. Brother, sister, sister’s life partner, and trailing at the end, ALBERT and EDNA.)

  LIFE-PARTNER: (looking at the photos on the wall, scowling) Just look at this. There is not a single picture of them. No wonder they feel abandoned!

  AUNT: It’s shameful.

  LIFE-PARTNER: It makes me sick.

  (KENT and GREY look on around the corner, whispering.)

  GREY: Do we tell them to turn around and look at all the pictures of the Silbers right behind her?

  KENT: Nah.

  GREY: Why not?

  KENT: I don’t know, the lesbian life-partner looks like a little bit of a loose canon, and I like to keep my distance from people who might stab me.

  MRS. SOMETHING-BAUM: Edna, what a tragedy. That girl’s eulogy was an outrage . . .

  MRS. WHOEVER-WITZ: How old is Cathy? Fifty-two? Eh. That’s young. She’ll find someone else . . .

  (The YOUNG PEOPLE, and everyone associated with AL and CATHERINE are now communing downstairs in the other living room, telling stories, trying to laugh, and holding one another in what appears to everyone upstairs to be an almost sickening display of overt affection. It is in this moment that KENT realizes that there is one who is not among them. LILLY is missing, and has been missing for quite some time. He grabs JESSICA.)

  KENT: Jess! Where did Lilly go?

  JESSICA: (turning) I . . . she’s . . . doing something.

  KENT: Like what?

  JESSICA: I don’t know.

  KENT: OK, well, would you pull her out of whatever it is she’s doing?

  JESSICA: (Vietnam War movie voice) Kent—she’s stuck. With the Silbers. Upstairs.

  KENT: (checking upstairs, drill sergeant voice!!) Well, put on a helmet and pads and get in there!

  (LILLY, is indeed upstairs, and she is tending to ALBERT personally, her hazel eyes wide and patient, as ALBERT sits in the center of the room with his address book open on his lap and a large, black Sharpie in his hand, which he is using to mark people out of the address book as God might mark them off the face of the earth entirely. LILLY looks on just as he swipes black across “1367 Fairway . . .”)

  LILLY: Albert, is there anything I can get you?


  ALBERT: (not looking up) A turkey sandwich.

  LILLY: Coming up. ALBERT: (calling after her) On rye.

  LILLY: (smiling, drowning him in her sweetness) No problem.

  (LILLY exits to make the perfect turkey sandwich. Suddenly AL confronts her at the food table in the dining room, having snuck over through the kitchen.)

  AL: What are you doing?

  LILLY: Shhhhh!

  AL: (whispering) What are you doing?

  LILLY: I am tending to your grandparents.

  AL: Who are you, Benedict Arnold?

  LILLY: Al.

  AL: Et tu, Brute?

  LILLY: Al! I’m tending to your horrible grandparents so you don’t have to!

  AL: Why?

  LILLY: Shh! (She looks over her shoulder at ALBERT and his Address Book of Doom.) Because someone has to. Someone has to make them think this is about them—all about them, not just a little bit, all.

  AL: Why didn’t you tell me this was your plan?

  LILLY: (eyebrow cocked) I thought you might overreact—

  AL: Ah. Noted.

  LILLY: –and that is what best friends are for, so now I am making Albert a turkey sandwich. On rye.

  AL: Lilly, I love you.

  LILLY: I love you too. (cutting the corners off of the bread.) And I intend to get through this afternoon by catching these nasty, nasty flies with honey.

  (She exits, sandwich in hand.)

  LILLY: Here you go, Albert. Turkey on rye.

  ALBERT: Did you use mustard?

  LILLY: (Miss America smile cracking at the corners) . . . No.

  ALBERT: I wanted mustard.

  LILLY: (brittle.) Coming right up.

  (Hours pass just as that one did. People come and go, ALBERT and EDNA’s friends ignore AL and CATHERINE, and the other way around. Tension. Turkey sandwiches. People shoving more bagels onto the dining room table and matzo ball soup into the freezer. Many people are going to compare this funeral to the ones in The Big Chill or Passed Away or Steel Magnolias. They’ll say, “Those were great films.” But this funeral is not like those funerals at all. This funeral totally sucks.)

  (AL rubs at her temples and makes her way over to GREY, who is nursing a drink.)

  AL: What is the status of upstairs?

  GREY: A Whoever-Blat or a Whatever-Stein just offered your grandmother a sedative called Nembutal.

  AL: Yeah.

  GREY: Well, it inspired me to pour myself a sedative called Bombay Sapphire . . .

  (LILLY enters from upstairs, flushed. Nervous.)

  LILLY: Al? Edna wants to talk to you.

  AL: (taken aback.) What?

  LILLY: I guess she is already in your bedroom, waiting. On the top floor.

  (AL nods to LILLY and makes her way to the top of the stairs. This will not be the last conversation someone from the SILBERS wants to have with her before the end of the day. There will be yelling from her AUNT and the LESBIAN LIFE-PARTNER in the hall. There will be an awkward walk down the street with the long-lost family members. There will be dead silence from ALBERT. But before continuing to the top floor, AL takes LILLY’s hand and looks down at CATHERINE, her mother’s friends, and above all, at the horde, the throng, the sheer enormous motley battalion of loving friends she has been blessed to have. Standing at the top of the staircase, all AL can do is laugh at all that has transpired.)

  The Protagonist Attempts Existential Escape

  (A Diagram)

  Edna

  She took me upstairs to talk.

  I now realize Edna likely wanted to express her hurt. I hadn’t mentioned anyone from my father’s side of the family in the eulogy. Of course that would be hurtful.

  But Edna was a good woman, wasn’t she? So often it was hard to tell.

  Her days seemed consumed by envy of the well-lived lives of others. With such vile bigotry, she had condemned my mother’s character and non-Jewishness, she diminished my mother for possessing flourishing artistic gifts. When her daughter Deborah became an undisputed expert in her quilting field, Edna started her own quilt collection—commandeering and attempting to outshine Deborah.

  Once, early in their marriage, a sophisticated expatriate neighbor of Edna’s named Elsie Greenberg bonded with my mother on her first visit to the Silber’s condo in Sarasota. Elsie was vibrant, cultured and worldly, and responded to my mother Catherine’s artistic sensibilities with great enthusiasm, and vice versa. Elsie invited the Silber family to dessert after the traditional Passover seder later that week, and excited, my mother accepted and reported the invitation to Edna a few hours later. She was met with Edna’s silence as she slowly stirred a pot of soup at the stove. “Oh,” Edna said quietly as she continued to stir, “you haven’t heard. Elsie passed away this afternoon. Quite suddenly. I am so sorry, Catherine.” Days later, in the condo’s elevator, my devastated mother was shocked to see, of all people, Elsie Greenberg: not dead, and sorry to have missed them. When my mother explained that they didn’t come over for dessert because Edna had falsely reported their potential host as deceased, Elsie shook her head and sighed, “That is just so Edna.”

  But this was also the woman who flew out to San Francisco (despite grave warnings from her overbearing husband) to talk to Deborah face-to-face after she had come out in a vitriolic letter to her parents.

  This was the woman who had heard I loved an authentic 1930s cocktail dress at a vintage store and went right out and bought it for me.

  This was the woman who wanted me to discover something that I liked enough that she could actively look for things to help me build a collection. I felt then that she forced this collection business on me—I just wasn’t into nutcrackers, spiders, or lobsters nearly enough to satisfy her—but, in hindsight, I think it was her way of “grand-parenting;” of keeping me in her mind, of her fragmented form of connecting. (How I sort of wish I could tell her now that it was owls.)

  I saw the repressed artistic soul—the piano teacher with a flair for jewelry, a gifted and inspired sculptor—unable to fulfill her longings, possibly jealous that I was given every freedom to do so.

  This was the woman who had tried so hard to teach me to play the piano. I still have the books from the 1940s that she used to teach all those children on the block in Detroit. (I wish I had been less intimidated by both her and her piano.)

  This was the woman who tried to reach out by taking me to the Fisher Theatre in downtown Detroit to see the tour of Jekyll and Hyde when I was fourteen. We had a wonderful day, a matinee and dinner after the show. I see now that she wanted to connect with me on a level that she knew I would appreciate. No more forced collections or wading through false histories, just the two of us in a theater. It felt like home. That was probably the best day I ever had with her.

  When I was a child—probably about five years old—I drew a portrait of her—a crude pen-and-marker drawing. I gave it to her hoping she would like it. But she looked down and saw the way a child had drawn her age—wrinkles and all—and was hurt. I hadn’t intended to break her heart in any way. Still, she took me aside and told me, “One day you will have wrinkles and be old too, and there is nothing wrong with that.” I wanted to tell her that I knew that. I was just trying to draw a picture of my grandma—that was all.

  She was the woman who taught me how to play a form of solitaire called “Thirteen.” She would patiently watch me assemble and disassemble the cards over and over again. It wasn’t until today, as I am sitting here writing this, that I realized my grandmother was a highly sensitive woman with an artistic temperament. A faded beauty who, like so many from her generation, was handed from her father to her husband before she had any emotional skills, actualized dreams, or even a concept of self. She was taken from one shelf and placed upon another, made to conform by bearing children, and be grateful for things she never asked for. Her whole life was a form of solitaire.

  All these truths aside, I would never be able to forget how profoundly she screamed at Rabbi Syme that Tuesd
ay, even as her son’s body lay upstairs. How hatefully she screamed the word shiksa and protested that I “didn’t even know him.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t know him. It was that they didn’t know me.

  “Alex,” I braced myself for a God-knows-what, “you understand that you are a disgrace to us? I don’t even know where to begin to—”

  She went on like that for a while. My mind filled with white noise as I watched her cataloguing my lifelong list of offenses in silent slow motion, the female, Jewish Grand Inquisitor in the trial of my teenaged character. Will they or won’t they burn me at the stake? I thought. Well, it is Friday, they’d better decide pretty soon or they’ll have to wait and burn me after Shabbat.

  I watched her pained expression, I wanted to tell her that I understood— that it was OK that she didn’t know or like me. It was alright that this was true because first, I didn’t think much of dishonesty and this family was rife with it; and second, and more crucially, I understood that I wasn’t very likeable. At least not to her.

  “You know what, Grandma?” I interrupted her heresy monologue, “You’ve made your point. Let’s just say it. Let’s get it out in the open— none of you have ever really liked me.”

  She gasped, thunderstruck. She covered her face, eyes transfixed with horror—like a vampire stopped in its tracks by the garlic covered cross of my blatant honesty. That was when I saw it: her hands.

  Back when my extended family was still speaking to me, people were always coming up to me and remarking upon how greatly I resembled Edna. I suppose I’m aware now that that is no small compliment. I don’t see it. Perhaps because I don’t want to, perhaps because I can’t see beauty in myself, or perhaps because I never really knew her so I cannot see her face in mine.

  But we have the same hands.

  There they were, covering her horror-struck face, completely in awe of the fact that her granddaughter had just taken it there.