The Big Z

The rabbi wore a powder-blue sports coat and boat shoes. His skin was cracked and orange and I half-expected to hear it crunch as he smiled and took my hand, “Very sorry for your loss, dear.”

I asked my brother how we got Bob Barker’s understudy for the service.

“Well, summer funerals are hard to dress for,” he said.

The ceremony was outside underneath a small green tent. Five of us made up the immediate family and the rest of the guest list was embarrassingly short—a few friends of my mother’s, a cousin once or twice removed and some woman in red pumps that my Aunt Linda referred to as “Dorothy.”

I wiped the sweat from my forehead. Had my grandmother been alive, she would have waited inside or lit up a cigarette and yelled at the rabbi to “hurry the fuck up already.”

The guests formed small clusters, saying a few words and moving on to the next like a square dance round. I looked over at my Aunt Lisa, the youngest of my grandmother’s children. Lisa stood near her siblings, picking at her eyebrows and looking out at the crooked rows of headstones. She hadn’t been down to visit in years. She was once very pretty and won competitions for riding horses but let herself go after having children. She said Barry—her “piece of shit husband”—liked her hair long so she tried to keep it short and choppy. But the style had grown out awkwardly, her bangs covering her eyes like a sheep dog and the back ending just above the nape of her neck—a sort of no-man’s-land of hair length. God knows she did what she could with bobby pins.

My uncle Lee looked the most upset. My mother would say that he was the favorite. He was the president of a company and spent a lot of time in hotels. I only ever saw him in tailored suits with straight gin talking about his “cunty” secretary, Joanne. At the funeral, he looked like a little boy. His wheat-colored hair was parted on the side, his arms were tightly folded and his puffy yarmulke seemed to be missing its propeller.

His wife, Linda, was standing next to him, talking to my mother. They never really got along. Sometimes they’d have lunch and they would laugh a lot. Linda called people “trannies” or a “fags” when she thought they were strange or frumpy. She was dressed in all black, like always, a deep v-neck and tailored slacks. She carried a leather tote and her sunglasses covered most of her face. My mother was gesturing a lot and laughing louder than what was appropriate; and Linda nodded every so often. When I was younger, I’d stare at her rings from across a table—thick, emerald cut diamonds with brushed platinum bands. One time Linda noticed and handed me her biggest ring to try on. “G’ahead,” she said, though she wasn’t smiling.

My mother’s cousin Bonnie and her husband walked toward me. Bonnie was a yoga instructor and wore her hair in a pony tail. We usually had Thanksgiving with them. They served small, chewy corn on the cob and I tried to make conversation with her kids—Marilyn Manson fans with widow’s peaks and long finger nails.

“You know, I gotta be honest, I thought she was gonna out-live us all,” said Bonnie’s husband with faint smile. My grandmother wasn’t old when she died. But I think we found it kind of funny that she was alive for as long as she was. She’d buy Benson & Hedges by the carton; cigarette butts lined with red lipstick were buried in a glass ashtray on her coffee table. A few hypodermic needles were under the “TV Guide” next to a bottle of insulin. I'd watch her take her insulin; she'd reach for the needle, as she would a cigarette or a sugar -free cookie, and I’d wince as she stuck it into her belly.

My grandmother’s hair was dyed bright red and she liked to wear a lot of jewelry. We lived with her for a little while. While my mother was at work, my grandmother stayed with us. She made dinner sometimes. We liked her brisket; though, it was different than my mother's. She would use a whole bottle of Pepsi to soften the slab of meat and top it off with onions and ketchup for taste. She didn't cook often. Most times, I’d find her sprawled out on her beige, leather loveseat, only wearing a loose bra and underwear. Her deflated, freckled breasts were slung over her stomach that shook like tapioca when she laughed.

“Come here, bubalah,” she’d say to me in a deep, raspy voice. “Give grandma a kiss.”

She’d often finger her gums and find a clump of cottage cheese or Saltine crackers behind her dentures. Smacking her lips loudly, she’d bring them close to my face.

I sat down next to her while she watched “Wheel of Fortune” or finished a crossword puzzle. I’d slide into the worn flesh of the couch; her loveseat stunk of old piss and fish. I never breathed through my nose when I was around her.

“Your grandmother,” my uncle Lee would say with a chuckle, “is a fucking farm animal.” He had a thick Long Island accent and sounded like there was a clothes-pin on his nose. When he and Linda would visit, we’d take turns telling stories about my grandmother over expensive meals. We had a few favorites—the time she slid off her couch when she was naked; when she shit her pants at an Italian restaurant; her cruise to the Caribbean where she broke her hip slipping in her own urine. No matter where the conversation started, we’d always end up talking about her.

The rabbi motioned for us to take our seats. There were only a few rows of wobbly lawn chairs but I sat in the front in between my brother and Lisa. Lisa had written the eulogy at my house the night before. She said she wished she could write about the peach and plum pits my grandmother would leave on her vanity table next to old bottles of perfume and liquor.

“That’s what I think of when I think of Mommy,” she said.

I felt the worst for Lisa. She hadn't spoken to Lee or Linda in years and I think even she knew that my grandmother didn't remember her before she died.

"The last thing I need is Linda and Lee looking at me tomorrow with those faces," my mother said. "I just hate those bastards."

My brother and I took a walk around our neighborhood while my mother and Lisa were writing the eulogies. We were heading toward the community pool. When we were far enough away from our house, I took out two cigarettes and handed him one. He smiled and brought it to his mouth.

"It's crazy that the Big Z is done," he said. "I mean, it's no way to live--stuck in a hospital, without any teeth and mistaking your nurse, Guadalupe, for your daughter. It's terrible."

We both laughed a little and made our way to the jacuzzi. We sat on opposite edges, our feet in the bubbling water and our pants rolled up to our shins.

"Mom told me you were upset when she told you," he said.

"I wasn't expecting it."

"Well, obviously. But, why'd you cry, though? It's not like you spent a lot of time with G Funk."

My brother and I used to talk about my grandmother's death while flipping through magazines at grocery stories or over fast food. We'd wonder if Linda and Lee would stop taking us out because we'd have nothing to say to each other; or how much longer she had left; or who would get her rings; or if her absence would bring the family together.

I told my brother, who was looking at his fingernails or fidgeting with a dead leaf, that I was sad because I felt so far-removed from it all, and from her.

"So, it was the guilt," he said.

"When we were kids, when we lived with her, it was funny."

"Well," my brother said smiling, "we're fucked up people."

We came home to my mother exactly as we'd left her, sitting at the table with a blue pen and blank printer paper. She told us she was stuck.

“Help me,” she said.

“I’m not going to write your mother’s fucking eulogy for you, mom,” my brother said.

My mother always had trouble writing. Birthday cards, thank you notes, invitations took her hours to craft—the backs and margins covered with her messy script. She looked at us, ruffled her eyebrows and let out a whine.

“Just get up there and speak from the heart,” my brother said. “You’ll be great.”

“Yeah?”

The rabbi got up to the podium. “Zelda had a thirst for life,” he said. “An avid mahjong player and loved to swim on the weekends. But nothing came before the love she had for her late husband, Seymour.”

My mother brought pictures of my grandfather to her once, “Who’s that?” she said to my mother. After my grandfather died, she moved on to another man she met in her nursing home—a retired solider named Joe who always wore a sailor‘s cap. She told us that they’d sleep together on a twin bed, though we couldn’t understand the logistics. Lee sometimes liked to joke about getting her some Viagra, and one time she even asked for it.

The rabbi finished his speech, and everyone was politely smiling. He called my uncle up first. Lee’s yellow lined paper shook a little as he spoke. The speech was neat and respectful and he cried at parts. I imagined he and Linda writing it on their long dining room table, thinking about the right adjectives to describe her—colorful, or maybe dynamic.

Lisa cried more and looked at the coffin as she spoke, her words slipping out like small, shaky bubbles. Linda’s voice was rehearsed and almost bored; like she was reading a story to a kid she didn’t know. She didn’t cry and I wouldn’t have expected her to.

My mother stood up. She hadn’t brought any sheets of paper or note cards. “Mad-e-lyn,” my grandmother would say, proudly drawing out her name, “is the prettiest of all my children.” My mother had spent afternoons with my grandmother holding her hand—which was curled into a permanent fist and always shaking. She bought her diapers and cleaned up her shit with old towels and they liked to sing duets together.

My mother smiled nervously and looked at me. As she moved toward the podium, she seemed so small. I remembered her speaking at grandfather's funeral years before. It was inside and there were more people and they cried when she spoke.

Now her voice was soft and her hands were shoved in her pockets like a child at her first recital. Her sentences began tumbling out and she tripped over the bigger words. “She was very…chars..cara…chistmati? How do you say it?” she said, starting to laugh. I found myself saying “char-is-matic” slowly like I was giving her an escape route. I winced at my brother and hoped that she didn’t notice.

Half-words and noises filled in her silences like she was practicing a foreign language. She looked at the rabbi and said, “She would’a liked you, boy” and a few people laughed. And then she turned around and straightened her cardigan and stared at the hull of her mother’s coffin. “I’ll miss you, mommy,” she said and started to cry.

She sat back down, and wiped her face dry, “What the fuck did I say?”

The rabbi said a few more words—some in Hebrew--and we walked toward the parking lot.

My mother and Lisa were in front of me.

“Did I completely make a fool of myself?”

“No,” Lisa said. “You know what, I think mommy would have liked yours, at least it was funny.”

I looked back at the green tent. A few men were folding up the chairs and taking the coffin away. Linda and Lee were the last to leave.

Linda walked up next to me, “Never,” she said “Let your mother speak at my funeral.”