Exit Laughing (22 page)

They were in such a semihysterical frenzy to get to those blankets at the foot of Aunt Molly’s bed, restore her dignity by covering up, if not the Sweeney family jewels, then surely the Sweeney family purse, that they forgot to look at her face.

Until Amy, who’d walked to the head of the bed, shrieked, “This isn’t Aunt Molly!”

At that moment, Aunt Molly was in the room across the hall, propped up in what would be (five years later) her deathbed, but in the meantime, there she was, surrounded by puzzle books, watching a thirty-year-old rerun of
Family Feud
and cutting all of them out of the will.

So the Grim Reaper walks into a bar and orders a beer and a mop
.

Listen up, Grim Reaper. If everything goes okay, I have about twenty years before you and I hook up, and I’ve got to tell you that, so far, you’ve taken too many in my family, and now you’re starting in on my friends. I mean, plucking my son Jamie out of our lives was one thing, those first few years when I felt as though my body were turned inside out, and then dragged through gravel, and then there was my nephew and those two premature grandsons I never got to know. That
was bad enough, but now Paula, my neighbor and friend of thirty-one years—well, she’s gone too. For thirty-one years, through all of those seasons, she stood at her kitchen window and I stood in my yard, where (over the fence and through the thicket of trees) we talked each other’s ears off and laughed ourselves sick. We’d had so much history. City girls, the two of us, not yet thirty years old when we first met, she was from Brooklyn and I was from Queens, and neither one of us was crazy about the flora and fauna of living in the sticks. Our mothers (her Italian Rosie, someone who claimed to have once danced in Atlantic City with Bert Parks, and mine, the Irish Helen, who claimed to have once had a conversation with Jackie Gleason in Bickford’s Cafeteria, improbable as that might sound, with all the time Jackie Gleason had spent in Toots Shor’s) were each a handful.

Paula and I raised rambunctious children; both of us buried sons.

Paula and I laughed about the day my older son took the bag of garbage instead of his lunch to school and the time that he suction-cupped Christmas ornaments to his forehead and couldn’t get them off.

We laughed about the day I saw the red-jacketed prowler in the yard, and Paula chased him through the woods with the fireplace poker. With Paula’s kitchen window closed and the blinds so tightly drawn, things are so quiet.

I’m old enough, Mr. Grim Reaper, sir, to see you all over the place. You’re everywhere I look, breathing down a neck, sitting on a shoulder, up to your eyeballs (if you even
have
eyeballs) in mankind, humanity’s constant companion, the
companion everyone hates. You have no social skills; you tell no jokes. (Something tells me that humor is not exactly your forte, but don’t give up hope. In another million or so years, maybe you’ll become funny. As Alan Alda’s character, Lester, said in Woody Allen’s movie
Crimes and Misdemeanors
, “Comedy is just tragedy plus time.”) I don’t think you can sing or dance. Except for the overdosed quarterback here, and the reckless pitcher in the Porsche there, you don’t seem to favor any one sport, nor follow any particular team. When you’re out there picking and choosing, one self-destructive athlete is as good as another.

No one ever invites you to get-togethers. Can you blame them? Imagine yourself walking through someone’s living room. All of that shrieking and yelling and guests all over the place, plastered to the walls, jumping through the windows. What fun would that be for you, standing there all alone, hanging off the mantle?

No one ever invites you to dinner. Can’t you take a hint? Where would the host or hostess seat you? The minute you sat down, why, everyone else would run out of the room—half a dozen people stomped on and crushed. (You’d get a hernia dragging home—wherever your home
is
exactly—all that fresh meat.) Not to mention the empty chairs and that nightmare of leftovers.

And speaking of a host or hostess—who would want to greet you at the door, take your scythe and stick it in the umbrella stand, take your long black hoodie and lay it across the bed?

Who wants to know if the Grim Reaper goes commando?

Nobody invites you along on vacation. The Grim Reaper on a cruise ship—well, it just wouldn’t work. The minute you entered the dining room—first seating, second seating, it wouldn’t matter—everyone jumping out of their seat, huddling on the other side of the boat, and before you know it, the whole shebang is on its side, and there’s Shelley Winters swimming past the porthole.

I don’t go to the gym, but I do read the papers, and it seems you sometimes stalk around weight rooms, waiting for those out-of-shape middle-aged men to bench press 350 pounds. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that you’ve been spotted at the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, licking your well-concealed lips at the fat people walking around with those plates piled high with shrimp toast and crab rangoon.

(Sometimes, I sense you following me through the mall, and from all the frantic shopping all around me—well, I’m not the only one who feels that way.)

You’re getting old now, Grim—happens to the best of us. After a million or so years in the same line of work, with no hope of either advancement or retirement (no Arnold Palmer Retirement Village for you and certainly no gold watch: you have neither golf pants nor wrists), even a Reaper like yourself starts to slow down. It’s not like the good old days, with all of those plagues, the oozing, the bleeding, the pustules (I’ll bet you haven’t seen a good-sized pustule since the last hoarfrost). With people living longer, you’ve got no job security. The handwriting is on that wall. (Have you considered a second job? Working extra days and nights? Graveyard shift?)

From what I can see, you’re not exactly the sharpest crayon
in the box. You don’t seem to understand that you should leave the babies and young people alone and instead take only those who are very, very old, the ones being chased down eternity’s corridors by far too many machines.

Not to be negative, but I think you’re very rude. You plucked my nephew from this life before he’d finished his one last poem. You took my little grandsons much too early, just grabbed them from their mother’s womb. You didn’t have permission to take my son from that hospital bed, and neither did you ask Paula before taking her baby from that bassinet. (I’d like to think of all of those boys together, in some field-of-dreams stadium, my mother, Helen, and Paula’s mother, Rosie, sitting together in the stands, watching all of those boys playing the baseball games they were denied in life, cheering them on in those cigarette-roughened voices.)

I know, of course, that none of this is your fault, and that “kill the messenger” is not a literal statement, no matter how tempting the idea. After all, you, too, answer to a higher authority.

Even if it was advertent, there were things you left behind. Not a hat, not an umbrella (not a hoodie, not a scythe), but memories. Not so much in the scheme of things, I suppose, but they’re mine to keep, and I’ll take what I can get. My nephew, sitting in front of me in his wheelchair, arguing with me about the existence of God (by now, he knows who was right), and then there was my second premature grandson, the one I got to hold, the one whose forehead I got to kiss.

There’s my last memory of my son, when the
him
of him was gone and his dear body looked like driftwood lying there
in that hospital bed, pure, white, beautiful, as though whittled out of birch or ash.

Then there’s Paula, lit up in that kitchen window for all eternity, with all the laughter that passed between us snagged like webbing somewhere on that fence, or somewhere in the ivy that’s wrapped around the trees.

When my eighty-year-old mother-in-law, a “gambling granny,” fell and broke her hip, we thought she was a goner. We should have known better. She had surgery, pins in her hip, and she recovered. Then she fell again, and broke her other hip. She had more surgery, more pins, laughing along with us at our lame “Bionic Nana” jokes, and again she recovered. Then she fell and broke her shoulder. No surgery, no pins this time, yet she recovered. Then she fell again, and this time it was the “mother lode,” so to speak, of Mom’s injuries. She fractured her skull.

When we went to see her, half of her face was exactly the same as ever, but the other half was black and purple, swollen as an eggplant. Her cheeks, pressed to mine, had always
felt soft as an antique linen tablecloth, but after the fractured skull, her face looked as pitted as an orange peel and somewhat leathery. I looked into her soft, dark eyes, trying not to cry. Mom hadn’t seen her own face at all, and didn’t know how bad she looked. “You should see the other guy,” she said, and instead of crying, relieved at how much herself she seemed, we laughed.

Because nobody had told us anything different, we figured Mom was doing fine, but she was in an overwhelmed, understaffed city hospital where nobody explained to us that in a head injury, especially in an old person, the damage is not always immediate, that bleeding takes a while to spread throughout the skull, and sometimes the full damage takes a while to assess. We thought the fractured skull would be like the other injuries, that she would heal and be back to herself, but that didn’t happen.

When she was in the hospital, Mom was that familiar self for only a short time, and then, suddenly, she wouldn’t open her eyes, and she fell into a state of shuddering and continual yawning, in and out of something resembling sleep. It was as if one day my husband, Patrick, was helping her unwrap the saltines on her dinner tray, and the next day he was spoon-feeding her, and the day after that, the tray sat untouched in front of her, and she was unresponsive. We were bewildered, not knowing if Mom heard or understood anything we said to her. It didn’t look good.

One afternoon, when Patrick went off to look for the doctor, I took matters into my own hands, so to speak. Standing by the side of the bed, I rubbed her arm. She had been a
good mother-in-law to me, and I loved her. I took her hand, a miniature version of her son’s, and held it softly. “It’s okay to let go,” I told her, “we’ll be okay. Just go to the light.”

At that moment, her eyelids flew open and she looked at me with something like shock, and for a minute I felt like a Judas. (True, I’d always had my eye on her Depression-era, cranberry-glass candy dish, but I could wait.)

“What light?” she asked me. “I’m going to Atlantic City!”

She never got there of course, but her skull healed, and she went back to her apartment, where she became someone like her former self, only newly assertive: a Nana who called Life Alert when she couldn’t close her bedroom window, a Nana who called the fire department when she wanted to watch Channel 2 and had lost the remote controller in the bedcovers, a Nana who then called the mayor’s office to complain about the racket and the mess the firemen made when they came with their axes and broke down her front door.

My granduncle Solomon played a dual role in my hometown in Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s—as the local Jewish community’s official
shokhet
, or kosher slaughterer, and its unofficial sardonic jokester. These twin talents often ran together, as in: “Do you know the hens make this funny cackle when I slit their gullets? Like they’re literally laughing their heads off at some private joke at our expense.” He claimed that when he’d killed his last fowl, he’d slit his own throat and laugh his head off at “the biggest joke of all, my life.”

The joke life played on Uncle Sol began at birth, back in the Ukrainian shtetl that was the family’s ancestral village. Apparently, he was a fraternal twin. His mother had already delivered five boys, and she desperately wanted a girl. However, Sol’s twin sister was stillborn and he survived, much to his mother’s chagrin. In revenge, she saddled him with the pet name of
krumeh oigen
(cross-eyed), though this affliction was barely noticeable. In the family, he was known simply as Krumele. As my mom said, Sol was
krume
, “and not only in his
oigen
.” Perhaps it was this cursed epithet that caused him to be a lifelong bachelor—that, along with his often thoroughly nasty but sometimes hilariously bitter tongue. The nickname
he chose for me was “Boots,” suggesting I was way too big for them altogether. This irritatingly apt tag stuck for years while I was growing up.

From the time I was eight, I was given the task of accompanying our African cook, Sout, when he took the Sabbath chickens to Sol’s shed on Friday afternoons. My mother insisted I go along because the
schwartzes
(blacks) could not be trusted; she said they’d vanish for hours to “whoop it up with their pals at the drop of a hat.”

The shokhet shed was a veritable poultry Auschwitz, a hellhole stinking with the blood and excrement of a host of terrified fowls. The place was crowded with African servants, and the racket of their chatter competed with the screeches and squawks of the chickens to create an unholy uproar. The floor was slippery, the stench was overwhelming; no matter how hard I tried not to breathe through my nose, I could not block out the dreadful odor.

Sol presided grandly over this scene of carnage. Draped in a long white apron decorated with dried gore, he grasped each hen by the legs and severed its throat with one swift slash of his razor-edged blade. As the decapitated bird’s red juice spurted into a pail at his boots and slopped over onto the cement floor, he chanted, “Why did the chicken cross the road? To meet up with me!” In such moments his grizzled, sunken cheeks and his wild grin recalled the Joker, the villain in the early Batman comics.