Reunion: A Novel Read online

  On the drive over, Mindy is somber and somewhat frantic where she sits in the booster seat behind her mother. She looks grayer than she has the past few days. She wouldn’t eat breakfast, and now her hair is hanging lopsided into her face. Her immediate mission is to complete a scarf she started knitting only last night. She wants to put it in the coffin with Stan. She’s asked permission. None of us has a problem with it, and heaven knows those funeral directors have seen worse and weirder. Mindy has been told that she will be seeing her father for the last time. She has been told that he will look the same, but also different. She’s been told that if she feels scared or sad at any time, she should simply tell Sasha, and Sasha will whisk her away. But it’s unclear what Mindy actually understands. It’s hard enough for me to understand exactly what’s about to happen. Of course it’s hard for a six-year-old.

  Mindy’s knitting needles click away in the backseat. Sasha turns up the A/C and turns down the radio.

  “I talked to Louise this morning,” she says.

  “How’d that go?” says Nell.

  “She’s not coming.”

  “Fine by me,” says Elliot.

  “Whitney and Stan Jr. aren’t coming either,” says Sasha.

  “Is there anyone you didn’t talk to?”

  “I didn’t talk to them,” she says. “Only Louise. She couldn’t wait to tell me.”

  “That woman is a piece of work.”

  “I did call Lily, though,” she says. “And she said she’s still coming, so I asked her to pick up Joyce.”

  “Good,” says Nell. “That was good thinking.”

  And it was good thinking; it was great thinking. Here’s this woman, this woman who is younger than I am, my father’s fifth and final wife, and she’s handling all the exes and their children. What is she, a superhero? Why isn’t one of us—me, Nell, or Elliot—handling this? Why is it I feel we are somehow the children in all this? Not adult children, but children children. Sasha makes me feel young and incapable. Is it just that she has a kid and has to behave more maturely? Is it that simple? I’d probably be more bothered by it except that I’m just so relieved that all this organizing has been taken care of by somebody else. And it’s so nice to have things taken care of! I miss having parents.

  “So it will be just the seven of us,” she says, “and we can stay as long or as short as you want. I promise not to get all sappy in there.”

  “Get as sappy as you like,” I say, sort of surprising myself. “For real. Who knows what we’re walking into? I mean, how can anyone prepare for this sort of thing?”

  No one says anything, which makes me think they haven’t understood.

  “I mean an open casket,” I say.

  Still nothing.

  “Because of, you know.” I tap my head.

  “Jesus,” says Elliot. He punches the back of my seat. “We get it already.”

  Mindy knits more furiously.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  I look out the window. I am eternally dense.

  To my right is Bitsy Grant, where Stan used to play tennis on the weekends. Golf was for suckers, he said. Golf was for Republicans. He’d been a Republican when he was younger, when there was more money, before all the alimony and child support. Then he became a liberal. He became a liberal who believed in playing tennis and bulk-buying at Sam’s Club. Then he became a depressive and a hoarder and, somewhere in there, suicidal.

  Joyce and Lily are sitting outside the funeral home when we pull up. There’s this “shade garden” that’s been created in the center of the parking lot. But now, because of the garden and its three myrtles and two benches, the parking lot is a roundabout.

  We park in one of the spots reserved for loved ones—that’s what the sign says, FOR LOVED ONES. It’s old-school Atlanta out here.

  Mindy dashes across the parking-lot-slash-roundabout to the shade garden, where Joyce is already beginning the tiresome task of standing, brushing herself off, and straightening her body as best she can. Lily is holding her elbow gently, and I’m reminded all over that I oughtn’t punish this young woman just for having a toad of a mother.

  “They’re ready for us,” says Lily, as they cross toward us. “But we thought we’d wait for y’all.”

  Normally, at a funeral, which this certainly is not—this is a viewing, a saying-goodbye and nothing more—there is someone who is obviously the lead beloved. There is the current wife or the oldest son or the most cherished granddaughter who everyone in attendance understands has the most right to grief. But here, it is not so simple. Not so obvious. There is the current wife, who is also the estranged wife and about whom I am still feeling the tiniest bit silly for having mistaken her winks and touches as flirtations. There is the oldest wife, who is also the most removed, the most out to lunch, the closest to death. There is Lily, who—though she came after us—was probably just as neglected as we three were, if not more. Dad hated Whitney. He would have had an even easier time writing off the twins than he did us. There is Mindy, who probably really does love him more than anyone else here, but she is the youngest and therefore the slowest and least able to comprehend. There are the three of us and we are here, we did come here, we did make this awful trip, but that certainly doesn’t merit title of chief beloved.

  And so, as a result, the seven of us walk toward the French doors of the funeral home as a sort of stilted blob—none of us wanting to claim the lead, none of us wanting to be left behind.

  I’m right there in the middle of the blob, right there at its heart as we funnel clumsily through the doors and into the icy, achy air-conditioning of the reception area. There is a hand at my back and I turn and there is Mindy, my little confidante. My gangly angel fairy. My sister.

  “Here,” she says in a throaty, high-pitched whisper. She holds up the world’s narrowest and least effective knit scarf. “Do you think he’ll like it?” She is all sincerity, all earnestness and honesty. There is not an ounce of treachery or cynicism in her.

  I take the scarf and study it. In fact, the stroke work—except where she ended and was in such a hurry—is quite skillful.

  There is a whole universe at work in Mindy’s brain, a whole universe of thoughts and wonders and concerns. There is an entire person in there, just waiting to get big and grow up and regret life. And suddenly, I see that the most important thing in the world isn’t that I missed my own childhood, but that she not miss hers.

  “He’ll love it,” I say. “He’ll just love it.”

  41

  goodbye

  The problem with funeral homes is that there’s all this formality and forced solemnity. There are expectations. For instance, there are the two funeral directors’ expectations that Stan Pulaski’s family members are—at this very moment—emotionally crippled by their sudden and wholly unexpected loss. (Perhaps we are emotionally crippled, but if so, it’s a preexisting condition, not one that was spurred by our father’s actions and can therefore be healed by our time with him here today). And it’s my belief that these expectations, more than anything, are what make people behave like emotional cripples when, really, all most of us want to do at times like this is get in and get it over with. It’s what I’d like to do, anyway. I’d like to get in there, do whatever it is we’re here to do, and go home. Or go back to Sasha’s, at the very least.

  The thing is, this makes me sound like I’m not having some reaction to all this. And I am. Since my time alone in the bathroom last night, I’ve been feeling—what’s the word?—moved. It’s not that his scribblings have, overnight, corrected whatever was wrong with us—with me and him—it’s more that I am willing, in a way I formerly was not, to see that there were depths to him. There were sides of him I couldn’t see or that he chose not to show me. All I’m saying is that there was more to the man than I suspected or allowed. And while there’s still every possibility that it’s entirely his fault, as a parent, for not exposing me to the other sides, the more interesting sides, the more honest
sides, there is also the possibility that I backed him into a corner. That I made certain decisions about him that he didn’t know how to refute or lacked the energy to disagree with and so he simply assumed the role I believed him already to be fulfilling. “Giraffe,” he’d said once, and I’d watched as his hands bent and molded themselves into the head of that great animal. “Rooster,” he’d said. And I couldn’t take my eyes away.

  The air smells like formaldehyde, and I feel a little light-headed. It’s possible the A/C’s laced with laughing gas. If I were a funeral director, I’d lace the air with laughing gas. It would be my first order of business on my first day on the job. I’d say, Get these mourners drugs, and do it STAT.

  We are now in the room with the coffin, and he is there, just over there, on the other side of the thin coffin wall. There is no procession. There is no line. There are two couches and we are huddled around them and periodically one or two of us stand, stretch, pretend to consider coffee, and then make their way slowly over to the man. To Stan. Where he has ostensibly been reconstructed.

  Those of us who are still sitting, who have not yet wandered over—we are respectful of the quietude of the ones who have. We pretend not to see them as they approach the coffin. We pretend, when they return to our small gathering at the sofas, that we do not notice that the blood has drained slightly from their cheeks. We pretend they have gone to get coffee, nothing more. It is coffee and coffee alone that explains their absence. This is what we pretend. Ah, family!

  It is only me now who has not ambled awkwardly over to the coffin. Sasha took Mindy, holding her hand, and we all pretended to look the other way. She picked up her daughter and rested her on her hip so the lanky thing could look down and see him, see what was there, what was left of him and how he looked in her freshly knitted scarf. And now they are done; they are among us once again, and it is down to me. We sit a little while longer and I can feel that there is a push for me to go. There is a tacit agreement that now it is my turn and my burden and I must go. Go and do and gratify. The sooner I have performed my duty, the sooner we can leave.

  I stand. My knees feel gummy, my vision rubbery. Perhaps this is visible to the others, because now Sasha is at my side, her hand is beneath my elbow, and she is walking me, pushing me, moving me noiselessly like a Ouija planchette toward the correct answer.

  “Why are you doting on me?” I say out of nowhere, not even knowing that I’d been thinking it. “Why are you making me feel special?” No one can hear us. We are too far from the sofas now and the A/C is too noisy.

  “Because you seem like you need it,” she says.

  We are approaching the coffin; we are approaching the edge of it.

  “Need what?”

  “Attention,” she says.

  “That’s it?” I say.

  “That’s it,” she says, and gives my elbow the slightest squeeze to let me know that we are here, that we have arrived. Finally. At long last.

  There he is. Shiny. Strange. His large face with its large features. His hands, folded together, a million different animals hiding in those fingers. Oh, Stan. Oh, Dad. Sasha thinks we would have been friends, if only I hadn’t been your daughter. But that’s not exactly right, is it? We would have been friends if I’d been your daughter and you’d actually been my father. If there hadn’t existed eleven different versions of me in your life. If you could have picked me. Decided on me. Then, maybe, we would have been friends.

  “Okay,” I say.

  I feel sick.

  “I’m good,” I say.

  I start to pull away.

  “Wait,” she says.

  From her back pocket she removes a small piece of paper. She takes a deep breath and hands it to me.

  “What’s this?”

  “It was wicked of me to mention it and then not offer,” she says.

  I start to unfold it.

  “Wait,” she says, her hand on mine, the paper in my palm, still unopened. “If you have to read it, I understand. But what I wanted was for you to give it back to him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s not something I want to be burdened with,” she says. “I think it’s unhealthy, keeping something like this around to put on a pedestal, like it actually has answers.”

  The note. Of course. How did it take me so long to understand? Between The Egoist and Peter’s phone call, I’d forgotten all about the note. The note from my father. To Sasha. Not to me. Not to Nell. Not to Elliot. But to Sasha.

  “All this?” I say. “Just to give it back?”

  “And for Mindy,” she says.

  I want to turn and look at Mindy, to find her in that small crowd of family behind us, but I’m afraid I’ll catch them all watching. It’s just as important that they too go unnoticed. There is a spell at work. A funeral home spell of gravity.

  “Why me?” I say. Sasha’s hand is gone from mine now. It is returned to her own person. The note is mine. It is in my palm and I know that I will never open it and I know it does not matter.

  “Like you said. I want you to feel special.”

  I am overcome with gratitude.

  “One question,” I say. I’m looking at Stan, but I’m talking to Sasha.

  “Anything,” she says.

  “To write a letter. To ask you to give me that book. He must have been lucid, right?”

  She puts her hand around my waist and leans into me. “No clue,” she says. Her breath is warm. She smells like the South. Like Chanel and old women and daffodils. “Not a clue in the world.”

  I move the paper to my right hand, then lower it slowly to his breast pocket.

  “Here?” I ask.

  “Good,” she says. “All done. How’s your heart?” She looks at my chest. I follow her gaze and look down too, at my hand, my telltale hand, clutching yet again.

  “My heart is fine,” I say.

  Very fine. Thanks for asking. Finer than it’s been in years.

  42

  cooking dinner

  Mindy,” I say. “What’s your take on life? Where do you come down on things?”

  We’ve pulled up stools to the kitchen island in order to watch Nell and Sasha slice and dice and prep for dinner. Mindy is in control of a package of M&Ms, which she’s strategically emptied onto the counter in front of her and is now arranging into tidy rows.

  She raises an eyebrow and scrunches up her nose. I want to gobble her up.

  “I like bread,” she says, and continues with her M&M organization.

  “I like bread too.”

  “But I really like bread,” she says, and she seems suddenly sad about it. As if, yet again, the weight of the world is on her shoulders. As if her feeling for bread is so strong it’s unmanageable and therefore a little frightening. She has a bit of our father about her. A bit of that all-or-nothing mentality. I see it peeking out at me.

  “Know who else likes bread?” says Sasha, wiping her knife on her apron. “This one here.” She jabs Nell in the side with her knuckles.

  Nell turns from the stove and winks at Mindy. “I do. I like bread and I like butter. In fact, I love butter.”

  I look at Mindy; she is unimpressed with these two. As am I. I’m much more interested in my half sister and her M&Ms right now. The casual cooking banter is too kooky. It really is like they’re flirting, but maybe this is simply what friendship looks like these days. Maybe this is intimacy. It’s been a while since I’ve experienced it firsthand.

  “Seriously though.” I undo a row of Mindy’s M&Ms. She corrects them and flits my hand away. “What are your plans for life? Do you have a career in mind?”

  “Cashier,” she says quickly, not taking her eyes off the candy.

  “A cashier?”

  She nods. She’s embarrassed, I can tell. This cashier business must previously have been a secret. But she also seems privately pleased to have finally told someone.

  “What kind of cashier?”

  She says nothing.

&nbs
p; “At the grocery store?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Is it bad?” She slides two M&Ms in my direction. I pick them up and pop them in my mouth. She giggles.

  “No.” In fact, cashier is something I might consider this summer. Sasha’s done a good job of teaching Mindy about being open-minded. When I was a girl, if I’d told Stan I wanted to be a cashier, he’d have said, “Try again.”

  “It’s great,” I add, play-knocking my shoulder into Mindy’s. “I just want to know more about you.”

  Sasha turns and smiles at me, but I can see she’s dubious about my line of questioning.

  “They’re so nice,” Mindy says. “And I like the buttons.”

  “On the register?”

  “They’re popular.”

  “The buttons?”

  “The cashiers!”

  “Oh,” I say. “The cashiers are popular.”

  “Yes.”

  She is again very serious.

  “And you want to be popular?”

  “Yes.”

  I nod. I wish I’d been this honest when I was young. I wish I’d known it was all right to admit to wanting friends, to wanting many friends. But I was always so ashamed. Self-reliance seemed to be what was valued in our family. Popularity was for the common man. We were individuals. We needed only one another and our minds and a few solid birthday parties at Benihana.

  “Popularity isn’t everything, though, right?” says Sasha, looking at her daughter.

  Mindy looks down at the M&Ms and blushes. They are now divided into rows of two. She pops a pair into her mouth and I imagine Noah’s animals. There they go, two by two. It seems a fair and gentle way to kill an M&M, with a friend at its side.