Anna in the Afterlife (3 page)

Because the night that Anna died was New Year's Eve, and because Janet and Danny had to eat somewhere after leaving Anna's deathbed, and because Janet didn't have the strength to cook, and didn't want to go to a restaurant, she went to her New Year's Eve party. Though Anna could see her daughter was torn by the very notion of going to a party while her mother's agonal breathing was still in progress, it was clearly a practical solution to an unusual problem. This was a very small dinner party in the house of an artist friend of Janet's where several couples gathered as a yearly event. None of them were Jews and their idea of a good meal was certainly not hers. Everything was brought in by a caterer. Next to each plate was a combination menu/place card (what you couldn't do with computers these days!). The appetizers were smoked oysters on Norwegian crackers, red caviar on leaves of arugula, and tiny baked escargot with scallion soy butter. The main dish was a choice of either Peking duck with mango chutney and sun-dried Bing cherries or piccata of veal with fried capers and truffle sauce.

Didn't these people know from roast chicken and mashed potatoes? From brisket and kasha? From spaghetti and meatballs with Kraft Parmesan cheese? Why not something edible?

Janet had no appetite, and no wonder, with her mother gasping her last in the nursing home. She toyed with spreading the pesto butter on the thirteen-grain organic wheat flour roll that, from the way Janet struggled to chew it, must have tasted like rubber galoshes. At least they would probably serve something her daughter could eat for dessert, something that would go down easily, like chocolate ice cream. But no: the caterer's two serving girls, dressed in black tuxedos and bow ties, carried into the dining room some conflagration, a forest fire of crêpes suzette blazing with flaming cognac.

From the fumes, Janet could hardly breathe. She covered her mouth with her napkin and fled to her host's study and dialed the nursing home. It was then the nurse told her that her mother had passed on at 8:35 P.M. at which moment, outside in the trees, there was a great outcry from the wild parrots who daily screamed across the skies in pairs. “The birds know,” the nurse said. “So they cry for her soul.”

Janet called those she had to tell: her sister Carol and her three daughters. She sat in her host's study for twenty minutes, staring at the walls, at the portraits of nude women he was famous for painting, women without heads but with magnificent breasts and behinds. So much sex in the world and always on everyone's minds. What was it all about? A sly trick of nature to guarantee that new babies got born to fill the void left by the old ones' dying. A mechanical replacement system. What kind of nut had concocted this master plan, ruthless in its requirements that things continue, demanding there should always be someone being born and someone dying? And preferably—in every case—in anguish, torment, and pain.

When Janet rejoined the party, her friends, though they had very strange tastes in food, understood, when she came back to the table trembling, that when a mother dies you don't offer flaming fondue, you give a hug, you give many hugs, you hold on tight because the news of death is terrifying and the death of a mother seems like the end of the world no matter how old you are.

Also because Janet's friends were good people, they encouraged her to talk about Anna all the rest of the evening, now and then telling her how their mothers or fathers had died and stopping only at midnight to put on paper hats and to blow whistles and throw crepe paper snakes at the ceiling while everyone drank glasses of champagne.

It turned out that the flu-bronchitis-pneumonia germ had been having a heyday. When Janet called the Burning Bush cemetery to arrange for her mother's funeral, they told her Jews had been dying like flies after Christmas, there was only one slot left for a funeral, four days from now, on Sunday at one P.M., take it or leave it. Furthermore, she and Carol had to come in for a meeting on the Friday before the funeral to work out the details. “Bring the clothes you want your mother buried in and anything you want buried with her. Be on time. We're under pressure here.”

Just as Janet hung up the phone, it rang. Sammy Mishkin's daughter was calling, inviting her to Sammy's funeral, Friday, at noon. So Sammy had beat Anna to it! Was she going to be upstaged by an old boyfriend? She was much put out by this. Ten years older than Sammy, she expected to be around to see him shocked by
her
disappearance. Now he had died first. This would surely take some of the steam out of her funeral. Sammy's daughter told Janet her father had died in bed, reading, his eyeglasses on his nose, a novel in his lap—a story about two men and a woman stranded on a fishing yacht. This seemed a death of the sort to be greatly desired. (But did his easy passing make up for his two heart bypass operations, his prostate removal, and his emergency abdominal surgery a month ago to keep an aneurysm from exploding?)

If you live, you pay for it. That's all there was to it. Sammy used to visit Anna in the nursing home, but when she could no longer wear her teeth, she refused to see him. Besides, she had grown tired of their conversations. He'd always say, “My doctor checked me out and said I'm good for another 40,000 miles.”

“For me, even ten miles more is too much,” was Anna's reply.

“Not me, I'm in denial,” Sammy would reply.

Anna gave him credit. A man whose parents were burned in Auschwitz had every right to play whatever game kept him going.

An hour before Anna's daughters had their appointment with the “grief counselor” to work out the details of Anna's bodily entry into eternity, they took their seats in the Vale-of-Tears Chapel at the Burning Bush mortuary. Both of Anna's girls nodded to Sammy Mishkin's daughters, and also to his first wife, a Holocaust survivor like Sammy, who now took her comforts from plastic surgeons, hairdressers, and health spas. His second wife, a blonde beauty like his first, was dead of liver cancer. In the back row was Sammy's latest lady friend, a pretty blonde—he had a terrible weakness for blondes—this one was at least thirty years his junior. The truth was, Anna had been a serious contender for the position of Sammy's second wife. The reason it came to nothing was that Sammy was too cheap for Anna and Anna was too platonic for Sammy.

His idea of a good time was to drive out to see the desert flowers in bloom with a packed lunch of a couple of hard boiled eggs in a paper bag, whereas Anna would have enjoyed a McDonald's hamburger, a little carton of French fries, a cold root beer. Music they agreed on: to enjoy it didn't require money or sex. Sammy used to stop into Anna's store, Goldman's Antiques, after Abram died and listen to Anna play Chopin on the upright piano she kept in the shop. She was young then, only fifty-eight, she had the world's best legs and she knew it. Sammy was a good page turner. He sometimes leaned over her too close and pressed his stomach against her back. Anna understood he was giving a hint about the next stage, waiting for her invitation. Something rose up in her throat when she thought about this possibility, the postures, the movements, the smells, the whole rigmarole leading to what men seemed to want till their last breath. She had done it when she had to, the result being the birth of her two girls, well worth the trouble, but what was the point of it now? Huffing and puffing to blow the house down. She was past it.

The best thing that had come out of her thirty-year friendship with Sammy (they stayed friends even after he married the second wife) was the car accident they were in together, when, on one of his cheap excursions with her to see the ocean (his wife hated the ocean and was glad to pawn Sammy off on Anna for an afternoon) he turned left from the right lane of the highway and crashed into an oncoming car. Anna was flung forward into the dashboard, her hands out for protection. The impact crushed her left thumb, rendering it useless for piano playing and getting her into a lawsuit that—in the end—produced a document (from a fancy psychiatric clinic in Beverly Hills) that Anna cherished to the end of her days.

Who could have guessed that an injury that prevented her (as she testified in the deposition) from opening windows, holding a newspaper, combing her hair, buttoning her blouse, kept her from cooking, slicing and dicing things (though she never cooked), that prevented her from filing her nails, turning on the tap water, washing dishes, and opening the mail, and most of all destroyed her life's greatest joy, piano playing, should turn out to be the source of the single finest written testimony (which would be forever on file in the legal records of the land) to her superiority?

When Sammy's insurance company had offered her a mere $500 for her injuries, her orthopedist, who drove a Jaguar and thus knew about the ways of the world, told Anna her injury was worth at least $5000. His brother-in-law was a lawyer—he'd help her out. The lawyer had had Anna examined by the psychiatrist who, as an expert witness, testified in writing that Anna had suffered a severe disability, “a tremendous shock, jeopardy, and infringement of life's enjoyment to her.”

Anna wished this document could be buried with her at the coming interment. She could recall certain passages verbatim:

Patient is a seventy-seven-year-old white female looking and acting younger than her stated age. She is extremely lively, vivacious, intelligent, sharp, and well-verbalized and expresses herself precisely and extremely well, has an appropriate and charming manner not displaying at all any handicaps of advanced age
.

A man like this, with framed degrees covering the walls of his office, should know charming and vivacious when he saw it.

Patient admits she frequently ruminates about her condition, is “disconsolate” (her vocabulary is superb), and while otherwise she does not feel her age at all, she is certain that the quality of her life has fundamentally deteriorated
.

In summarizing Anna's personal life in the document, he added,
“The patient has an older stepsister with whom she has little contact because this sister values beauty and riches while patient cherishes integrity and inner worth. Her younger sister values knitting and collecting little knickknacks while the patient is a devotee of culture, art, and music.”

Anna had always wanted an objective assessment of her attributes from a neutral (but astute) observer. Surely the doctor had nothing to gain from all these compliments. At the end he wrote under “Mental Status”:
Patient is a pretty, well-groomed, very well-verbalized, attractive, wiry lady, energetic, full of life, vivacious, and delightful. She relates extremely well without any hesitation, is capable of expressing warm emotions. She is obviously a sophisticated musician who has a great deal of general knowledge of music and art; she is well trained, competent and enthusiastic. Her memory is excellent. She is sharp and quick, responds appropriately to all questions and her concentration abilities are undiminished. She feels well-appreciated and loved by strangers but particularly also by her family, her sister, and two daughters, with whom she appears to have excellent relationships, as well as with her grandchildren
.

Anna wondered, just for the briefest second, if this expert doctor had been expertly fooled by her. With all her glissandos, with all her thundering chords and harmonies ringing in her ears, with all the applause and love she had invented, didn't she, just for a second, feel the terrible drumbeats of loneliness and of terror? What if she were nothing but nothing? What if under all that flattery, all the chattery words came to a bushel of lies? What if the truth were known about her? She would never admit to her doubts. She would drown them out with boogie-woogie. She would suffocate them with Rachmaninoff. She would keep the image of Anna, as she needed it, shined bright as a silver candlestick.

Now Sammy lay in a closed cedar wood coffin in the Vale-Of-Tears Chapel while some girl rabbi was addressing a sad little crew of seven or eight mourners. Janet and Carol, who had to be there anyway to make arrangements for the disposition of Anna, had decided to pay respects to Sammy, as well as to see how funerals were done, the better to plan for their mother's in two days.

Although Anna had no doubts that women were superior to men in every way and her general scorn for rabbis was unshakable, she could see no reason why this little rabbinette, this homely girl with a quavering voice, this skinny
maruchka
, should be standing there in the place of some old rebbe with a long white beard. A funeral speech required some experience—how could you talk about death if you were barely out of bobbie socks? Besides, the girl was ungifted. She spoke pure boilerplate: “Samuel Mishkin was a good husband, a good father, a good family man.”

To take a fee for this kind of trash was highway robbery.

Sammy's two daughters sat looking at their laps, having God knows what memories of their father. What did Anna know except that their relations with him were not so good. The problem had partly to do with how many blonde women he favored after he divorced their mother—and in such fast succession. Still, all the mourners looked baffled and offended at the paucity of what could be found to be said about the dead man.

Anna would have said plenty: how he pressed flowers from the desert blooms into the pages of books, how he helped the old people at the senior center to do their taxes (he had been an accountant and a good one). How he had a fine appreciation of Mozart (which could not be said of every accountant).

The girl rabbi was already opening her little booklet (the one the mortuary gave to everyone) to say some prayer when Anna's daughter, Janet, stood up in the pew with her hand raised.

“Excuse me, but would you mind if I said a few words about Sammy? He and my mother were very good friends for over thirty years.” The first wife looked worried, as if news of another blonde bombshell were going to come out of the woodwork, but her older daughter whispered something to her that cleared up the matter. “Please do say something,” Sammy's daughter urged Janet, who took the podium.