On fire island, p.3
On Fire Island, page 3
I squirmed while he answered truthfully.
“My father is Jewish and my mom is Protestant, but we were raised Jewish—culturally, at least.”
I thought she would give her standard answer, “You are what your mother is,” but she didn’t. She asked him a question that no one had ever asked him before.
“Who do you believe in, God or Jesus Christ?”
He didn’t have an answer, so she plowed on.
“I assume that you and my granddaughter have had sex?”
The whole family, who were now glued to this inquisition, jumped in to stop her.
“I have a point,” she insisted, raising her hand in the air like a traffic cop.
“When you are at your most fulfilled moment in sex, do you scream out Oh God or Jesus Christ?”
“Oh God,” he replied sheepishly.
“Okay, how about when you’re flying on an airplane and there is horrible turbulence? When the plane lands safely, what do you say to yourself?”
“Thank God,” he responded.
“One more. You’re a sportswriter, right?”
“I was. I recently took leave to concentrate on writing novels and to spend more time with Jules.” He looked over at me lovingly, and I wasn’t sure if he was for real or trying to score points with Nana Hannah. He hoped his affection and accomplishments would distract her. It didn’t. She continued her inquisition.
“What football team do you root for—Jets or Giants?”
“Whoever is playing against the Pats.”
Nana laughed. “Nice. Mets or Yankees?”
“Yankees.”
Nana Hannah shook her head and laughed some more. “Mets or Yankees he’s sure of!” She continued, “You’re home on the couch watching the Yankees. Bottom of the ninth, tie score, two outs, bases loaded, and the phone rings. You get up to grab it and catch your pinky toe on the corner of the cocktail table. What say you?”
“Jesus Christ!” he proclaimed, laughing along with everyone else.
Nana Hannah stood up and kissed Ben on top of his head, officially proclaiming him to be Jewish enough. Ben had adored her since that moment and was very sad when we lost her a few years later. I knew it was out of some sort of respect for her and her sweet proclamation that day that he had agreed to be a part of the elaborate mourning rituals—because he had assured her that he was Jewish enough.
Ben stared out the window for most of the ride to the city, clutching the unlit candle whose flame, he was told, would burn for seven days, guiding a part of my spirit on its journey toward the afterlife.
The Rabbi had taught me that everything has a soul and that every soul has five dimensions. One of those dimensions, the Ruach, translates to the words spirit and wind. I clung to this often in my last weeks on earth. It comforted me.
I am the wind, I thought, in the moment.
Back at the hospital, I only realized I had passed when I could no longer feel Ben’s hand cupping my cheek. At first I attributed it to the morphine, but it soon became obvious that I would never feel his touch again. As I realized it, I saw Nana Hannah, clear as day, coaxing me to come join her.
From what I could tell so far, you are given two choices when you die: go right ahead to see the people who have passed before you, or stay with your person until you are ready to go. I missed Nana Hannah something awful, and it was hard not to run to her, but after everything I’d been through I yearned for one last summer, with Ben, on Fire Island. It was obvious that he needed that too. As Nana Hannah faded from sight I wondered if I would spend eternity in limbo.
three
The Shiva Fugitive
The skyline rose in front of us as we crossed the bridge. Ben hadn’t grown up in the city as I had, but about forty-five miles away in Jersey. His delightful, childlike reaction to the sight of the Manhattan skyline, even after years of seeing it rise into view, always delighted me in return. Today he was devoid of expression.
The shiva would take place at our apartment, another detail that I found worrisome. Ben had wanted to be at home for the week, as opposed to being held hostage at my parents’ palatial pad, but when the Rabbi announced our address at the funeral, I could see the shiver of fear it sent down his spine. It wasn’t an overreaction: all of those people strolling about our new two-bedroom, peeking into the room we had once been decorating for our baby, empty except for an orphaned treadmill and errant splotches of nursery paint colors, as if my dying wasn’t pity-inducing enough.
The limo stopped at the corner of Columbus and Seventy-Second. Everyone but Ben piled out. My sister had been sobbing uncontrollably since we’d crossed the bridge, and Ben never even turned toward her. Normally, he cared for my sister very much, but I doubt he’d even heard her crying.
My father slid back into the car and put his arm on Ben’s shoulder in encouragement. I questioned where my dad was getting the strength. His composed-mourner act was a little suspect and left me wondering if he had uncharacteristically helped himself to a taste of my mother’s Valium.
“Cousin Shirley has everything set up. Nothing for you to worry about. C’mon, son,” my father said, coaxing Ben out of the car.
I had never heard him call Ben “son” before. I’d never heard him call anyone “son” before.
Ben gave in and dutifully followed, more zombie than man.
When the elevator opened on our floor, my formidable cousin Shirley blocked them in the hallway like a linebacker. She was carrying a traditional tin wash cup and bowl that, along with her accent, resembled an artifact from a Polish shtetl. Ben tried to avoid her, but even he didn’t have a chance.
“You must not enter the house until you have washed your hands,” she insisted. “You cannot bring death into the house!”
He made two fists, pulled them to his chest, and pushed past her. He wanted to keep my death with him. I worried he may never wash again. The others consoled Shirley and apologized for Ben’s behavior. They all washed their hands. Twice.
Ben entered the apartment and grimaced at the covered mirrors and traditional low mourners’ chairs. My great-uncle Morris saw Ben’s bothered reaction and approached him.
“Benjamin, if there is anything I am sure of in this world or the next, it is that Jewish practices of mourning are invaluable. If you follow them, they will help you get through this.”
Morris mistook Ben’s blank stare for interest and launched into a lengthy explanation of each detail. I knew better. When he finished, Ben asked the question that had clearly been plaguing him since he walked through the door.
“Where’s my dog?”
Uncle Morris smiled. “In your bedroom.” He placed a loving hand on Ben’s shoulder. “I’m sure Sally will say all the right things.”
As Ben shut our bedroom door behind him, Sally, our sixty-pound bordoodle, jumped him and cried as if she knew what had happened. Ben locked the door and lay on the bed. Sally snuggled next to him, her head in his lap. I’ve never been so thankful for rescuing that dog as I was on that day. I immediately pardoned her for the Manolo Blahnik incident in exchange for Ben not having to be alone.
He reached over for my pillow and placed it over his face. At first I worried he was trying to off himself, but as he took long deep breaths through his nose, I realized it was infinitely sadder. He was inhaling my scent. He sat up abruptly, his eyes fresh with panic as he pulled off the pillowcase and folded it up as compactly as possible. Sally followed him to the surprisingly empty kitchen, where he walked over to the cabinet that housed the ziplock bags. He removed a large one and squeezed in the pillowcase, sealing it to protect my smell from fading. The ziplocks sat next to the poop bags, prompting Sally to wag her tail in anticipation of a walk. Ben smiled at her, a real smile that seemed to come with a cartoonlike light bulb overhead. He grabbed the Fire Island Ferries schedule taped to the fridge and shoved it and the pillowcase in his pockets. He clipped on Sally’s leash and took a deep, cleansing breath for strength. In the kitchen doorway his gaze went from the front door to my family to the yet-to-be-lit yahrzeit candle on the entranceway credenza. The Rabbi’s words, “This candle will light the way for Julia’s soul,” ran through his mind. He suddenly wondered if the things the Rabbi had been filling my head with for months were more than mere words to ease my fears. He wondered if I was with him.
I wished so much that he believed. I’d explained to him many times over the past few months that death was not the end, that my soul would not perish with me but live on eternally. I even asked him to join me and the Rabbi on occasion to hear her expertise on the Kabbalah, the afterlife, and death itself, firsthand. It made me much less fearful of dying, and I knew it could make him less fearful of losing me. After a while, I stopped talking about it. He wasn’t a believer, and I needed to be all in. I was determined that, when the time came, I would not go kicking and screaming but in fact go gently into that good night. This is not to say I didn’t try to live; God knows I tried to live. But when there was no possibility of doing so, I wanted to leave in peace.
Ben now found himself praying that it was all true. He decided he couldn’t risk taking off without the yet-to-be-lit candle, if so, possibly leaving me behind. He waited for a heated discussion among my family members to distract them, which took all of two minutes, slipped the candle under his suit jacket, and left, mumbling “Walking the dog,” to anyone who may have been listening. As he exited through the revolving door of the lobby downstairs, he anticipated being weighed down by the afternoon heat, but he felt immediately lighter. He hurried to the corner, turned, and headed for our parking garage, where he officially became . . .
The Shiva Fugitive.
four
The Pretty Way
Rush hour had already begun when Ben escaped the city. Between the gridlock and having to pull over on account of not being able to see through his tears, there was no way that the Shiva Fugitive was catching the four o’clock ferry. As he usually did when he realized we weren’t making the boat, Ben took an alternate route out east, the “pretty way,” as we had taken to calling it.
The pretty way, a two-lane highway called the Robert Moses Causeway, is a bucolic slip of mid–Long Island road flanked by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Great South Bay on the other. If you were dropped there from above, you would probably guess you were somewhere on the coast of California or the Florida Keys. Long Island often gets a bad rap—people think of strip malls and endless traffic, but parts of it are breathtaking. Driving this length of road offers the opposite aesthetic to sitting in traffic on the Long Island Expressway, plus it had the added benefit of not passing the cemetery again. I pictured him seeing the exit and pitching a tent next to my freshly dug grave.
An archipelago of tiny islands appeared on the bay side dotted with quaint cottages where residents travel to and fro on motorboats. On the ocean side, the Atlantic peeked out between breaks in the beachgrass-covered dunes. Each glimpse of the sea took your breath away, again and again and yet again.
In normal times, we would open all the windows, allowing the week’s tension to be washed away by the cross breezes of the ocean and the bay, but these were not normal times. I wished Ben would at least crack his window, but he seemed dead set on not breaking the seal of grief.
With hours until the next ferry, and an overwhelming desire not to interact with other humans, Ben pulled the car off the road and onto the dunes, where he sat and watched the waves lapping the shore. Like the sea air, the ebb and flow and ebb and flow of the ocean usually took away his stresses, but short of a tsunami, there was no wave big enough to accomplish that today.
I watched Ben and Sally and the waves for a bit, and found myself wishing that things had been different between us. While I was grateful that we had spent so much time together—especially considering the hard stop that my death brought to the relationship, I sometimes wished that I hadn’t been Ben’s editor. While it had been a beautiful and very successful partnership, Ben would now lose his wife and his editor in one fell swoop. Either on its own would have been hard enough for him to bear; together, he was completely lost. He was supposed to turn in a new book proposal in the fall, the third in a three-book deal. Looking at him now, that seemed like an impossibility.
I thought about how different we might have been if Ben hadn’t given up his reporting job to become a full-time novelist. If he had been following a busy schedule of sporting events, prioritizing “the game” over birthdays, anniversaries, and even Thanksgiving, we would have been an entirely different type of pair. I had always looked at those “we have separate lives” couples with curiosity—the ones you find at cocktail parties standing at opposite ends of the room, deep into tales of their individuality. Ben and I stood so close to each other at cocktail parties that we may as well have been one person. In the spirit of the original celebrity super couples like Brangelina and Tomkat our host would often introduce us as Benlia, and we would all laugh about it. It wasn’t funny now. It had been years since either of us had spent a night apart. Even when I was in the hospital, he never left my side. I was frightened for him.
Ben let out a guttural sigh. Sally whimpered in response, and I decided I needed a break. I bailed and headed to the 4:00 p.m. ferry without them. It was selfish on my part, but hey, you only die once.
five
The Usual Suspects
People sometimes asked me why we put down roots on a barrier island where the threat of “one big wave” always loomed large, and I usually just smiled and shrugged, not wanting to reveal the secret. It’s not the beauty of knowing that the ocean is just mere steps away from wherever you are, or the benefit of living sans cars and therefore without traffic and pollution. It’s not the sound of the noon siren that reminds you to head to the market to pick up lunch, or the charm of the familiar scene when you get there. It’s not the fountain of youth effect that being surrounded by water seems to imbue, or how the minute you set foot on the ferry the weight of the world wafts away in the summer wind. And it’s not the sunsets over the bay, or the anglers lined up in the morning surf, or the fawns that dutifully follow their mamas across the ball field. The secret, the real secret of what makes this narrow barrier island so special, is the people.
Fire Island is a haven for warm souls and mismatched pairs, for neighbors, lovers, and kooks, and kook-loving neighbors. It’s a community of people who spend the winter dreaming of their return. If you were lucky enough to have been born to it, odds are you would find its sand between your toes for the rest of your days. And if you came upon it through your own volition, as I did, your odds could be similar. It was a magical place, and if you believed in it, if you felt the magic, you could become a lifer as well.
I really never thought I would see it all again, and as I arrived at the ferry terminal—nothing more than a parking lot, a ticket booth, and snack counter—I nearly kissed the ground.
There was a small crowd waiting for the boat, many of whom looked as if they had come straight from my funeral. An interesting selection of the usual suspects. I scanned the group and homed in on Pam and Andie and baby Oliver. I had yet to get a good look at him. I peeked into his carriage but could barely see him bundled up under a hat and blanket. Even though they had him dressed for winter in June, I knew they would both be great moms. They had so much love to share.
Pam and Andie had known each other forever, literally forever, but only became a couple about six years back. Their coming-out trajectories were very dissimilar. Andie could barely remember a time that she didn’t know she liked girls, changing her name from Andrea to Andie sometime in the fifth grade, while Pam got with every guy she could straight through college. She joked that she was a bit of a slut, but in the end she was just trying to feel something, anything, which she didn’t until the first time Andie kissed her.
“Oh,” she had said out loud in the elevator of the Brighton Beach apartment building where both of their grandmothers lived.
Andie and Pam had known each other since they were kids, and the last time she had done something scandalous in the elevator with Andie, they had gotten chased by the building’s super for pressing all the buttons. At ten, she thought it quite thrilling. Their kiss topped it.
Andie took a step back.
“Oh, what?”
“Oh my God,” she clarified.
They both laughed. The Q train could not make it to the city fast enough after that. They spent the rest of the weekend in bed.
When Pam relayed their meet-cute story to me, she riffed on the famous Billy Crystal quote at the end of When Harry Met Sally: “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with women, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
Pam’s grandmother—Bubbe Bertie, as she liked to call her—recognized something in Pam that she had yet to let herself discover. When I spent time with her bubbe, the few times I had, I figured that looking at her granddaughter may have been a bit like looking in the mirror. My guess was that Bubbe Bertie would have lived a very different life if she were born a few decades later and that she wanted more for her granddaughter. In the spirit of another eighties rom-com, Crossing Delancey, Bertie fancied herself a Jewish matchmaker and invited her neighbor and her neighbor’s granddaughter (Andie) for Shabbat dinner one night, when Pam was coming from the city, hoping the two women would reconnect.
When hearing of the surprise guest Pam said, “Bubbe. This is awkward. I haven’t seen her in years.”
“I think you will have a lot in common,” Bertie insisted.
There was no use in arguing. There was never much use in arguing with Bubbe Bertie.
