Cures for Heartbreak (2 page)

THE BOY

After the service, we were ushered out to the limousine briskly and on to the cemetery, and before I knew it we were home.

For hours we sat like mannequins, greeting the parade of sympathizers. There were people I hadn't seen in years, people I'd forgotten existed: Mrs. Lowery, my kindergarten teacher; Dr. Book, our orthodontist; Lottie Silverberg, my babysitter when I was six. I'd almost stopped being surprised at who appeared when Jay Kasper, a senior at our school, strode through the door.

My stomach jumped: he was the demigod of the Bronx High School of Science. He was Alex's year but she didn't know him, and she thought it was ridiculous that my freshman friends and I often trekked to Central Park to swoon and fantasize while he played ultimate Frisbee. His father was a partner at the law firm where my mother was a paralegal, but we'd never spoken, except for one brief exchange on the subway: “You got gum?” he'd asked me and my friends. Ten packets of Wrigley's had been proffered instantaneously.

Mr. Kasper gave us his condolences; Mrs. Kasper clasped my hands and stared at me as if I was an abandoned kitten she wanted to stuff into her pocketbook.

Then came Jay. He stood before me, clutching a silver baking pan. Our eyes locked. “I brought you this,” he said. The pan was filled with melted brown crayons.

“Wow, thanks.”

“They're Rice Krispies treats. Made with Cocoa Krispies, that is.”

I set the pan down beside the coffee urns, and Jay handed me a treat. I crunched into it. It stuck to my teeth. We stood there, chewing.

“This is good,” I said.

“Yeah.” He inspected a Cocoa Krispies treat thoughtfully, then looked at me. “You know I spent last summer in Kenya? Studying wildlife and stuff? They have parties there when someone dies. To celebrate that they're in a better place.”

“Really? Huh. I didn't know.” We were silent for several minutes; I wasn't sure what to say. All I could think was,
Jay Kasper is standing beside me. Jay Kasper is in my house.
With him next to me, his voice so close to my face, the brick lodged in my chest loosened a little; for a moment I forgot it existed. In its place was this other person, and I wondered at how life did that, how in its bleakest moments the world coughed up somebody new.

“Hey—I like your dress,” he said. “I mean—it looks good. Nice. Black.”

Alex rushed over from the tray of cold cuts.

“
Mia.
We
need
you. In the
kitchen
.” She whisked me into our tiny kitchen, nearly pinning me to the refrigerator.

“What?”

“You know, you're really
sick.
”

“What am I doing?”

“You're flirting with this guy minutes after Mommy's funeral.” She shook her head, exasperated. I closed my eyes
and envisioned the sister I often dreamed of—tall and blond and 34C, wise to the secrets of eye shadow application, French kissing, hair removal. But when I opened my eyes it was still Alex, saying, “Why don't you skip the pretenses and just take him to bed?”

“Why don't you shut the fuck up?”

Several heads peeked down the hall; the voices in the living room froze. My father, still clumsy in his new single-parenting role, trudged awkwardly into the kitchen to ordain peace.

“Girls. What's the matter?”

“Mia is a
bitch
is what's the matter.”

Fanny Gluckman padded in. Her daughter Lucy had been my best friend before they moved away, but we hadn't been in touch lately; Lucy had left a message on our answering machine three days ago saying she was sorry, but she couldn't make it to the funeral. A part of me hadn't wanted anyone to come to the funeral, to witness the horror that had formerly been our normal lives—and another part wanted everybody I'd ever met to be there, because the more people who came, and the longer they stayed, the less real it all seemed.

Fanny carried a Barnes & Noble tote bag, which she never put down. A tarnished Star of David hung from her throat. “Girls, let's think of your mother right now. Greta wouldn't want you to be fighting. It's important that we keep thinking of what your mother would want. When a family sits shiva—not that you're doing that, exactly—but the point behind the
traditions, of covering the mirrors, not wearing any makeup, not fighting with each other, is to think of the person who died. Not of yourselves.”

Alex and I avoided each other's gaze and returned to the living room; things seemed pacified until Jay came up to me to say good-bye.

“Hey? Hey. You know, the Hellmonkeys are playing at CB's Friday. I mean—I bet you wouldn't want to see them with me.”

“Friday?”

“I mean, I'm sure with everything you wouldn't want to. It wouldn't be right. Forget—”

“No—I would. I love the Hellmonkeys. I'd love to go.”

“She's
disgusting,
” Alex said to our father when the only visitors left were my mother's silent, dazed parents, staring blankly at their stained and empty coffee cups, and Fanny, wrapping up the casseroles.

“It's not disgusting,” my father said diplomatically. “It'll be good for your sister to see a performance that she likes. If she wants to get out of the house, she can go.”

Alex glared at me as we cleared the tables.

“You know, in Kenya they have huge parties after someone dies,” I said. “One big fucking party.”

She banged the dishes into the sink. “This isn't Kenya, Mia, this is Queens. Stop saying
fuck
.”

“You say it.”

“That's different. I'm older.”

“Enough,” Fanny shouted, her mouth full of fruitcake. “Let's put a stop to this now. Alex, Mia, come here.” She took each of our hands. “Tell each other ‘I love you.'”

“I love you,” Alex whispered with remarkable hostility.

“I love
you,
” I snapped.

“That's a start,” Fanny said.

THE MUSICAL SHOW

Jay Kasper picked me up in his parents' Astro van. I wore my velvet halter dress; my sister's gaze drilled into my bare shoulders. She and my father said good-bye to us from the couch, where they'd settled in for a thrilling evening of
This Old House
repeats.

On the drive over the 59th Street Bridge I kept thinking that Jay had been sent to me for a reason. “There's a reason for everything,” Fanny had told me on the phone while my mom was in the hospital.
What reason?
I'd wanted to ask.
What? What could the reason possibly be?

Now I thought:
If God was a comedian from the Borscht Belt, He would want me to go on a date to a club shortly after my mom's funeral. In fact, He probably planned it this way.
Like the dress, Jay Kasper had been sent to me. For a reason.

We parked on 7th Street and walked past the night
crowds and litter and homeless people leaning on parking meters, over to the Bowery.

We saw other people from school at the club—Mallory Diaz, Maria Heller, Gloria Morales—the senior girls my friends and I always admired from afar, with their silky dark hair, black tights, and the matching high-heeled black boots I coveted. Where they bought those boots I didn't know, though I'd searched for them in Bloomingdale's and nearly every store on 8th Street. Those girls' outfits always seemed put together with a perfection I never could master—even when I wore what I thought was the perfect dress, my tights always seemed to bag at the ankles, my shoes got scuffed, my hair blew into creative sculptures.

The girls eyed me up and down as Jay led me through the crowd. The music pounded. “It's a really good band,” he said. The song was called “Morning Breath” and, Jay explained, was about the lead singer's ex-girlfriend.

“Morning breath!” the lead Hellmonkey screamed. “She's got morning-morning-morning breath!”

The crowd chanted. Boys dove off the stage. “Hey—you having fun?” Jay shouted.

“Yeah! Lots.” I wasn't really having fun; it was something else entirely, something not quite fun but not exactly misery either. His arm brushed mine; he turned to me every few seconds and grinned. I tried to look confident and assured, as if the two of us here together was a perfectly natural thing. I
worried that my mother's death showed all over my body, visible in my hair and on my forehead, seeping out of my velvet dress, the same dress I'd worn when I'd come home late two months ago from my neighbor Rita Kircher's sweet sixteen. My mom had waited up, and we'd sat at the kitchen table eating Entenmann's pound cake as I told her about the party.

Midway through the show, Mallory and Gloria came over to us. “You know Mia?” Jay asked them.

They smiled politely at me, as if I was his grandmother, and pulled him aside. I couldn't hear what they said; they excused themselves and took Jay with them, to talk to somebody else. I stood there alone, jostled between six-foot-tall boys with blue hair and girls with spiked belts, stuck in a forest of sweaty skinny metal-studded humans. I pretended to enjoy myself. I was about to escape to the bathroom when an overgrown limb knocked into me, spilling an entire beer down my dress.

“Oops,” a guy in a Megadeath T-shirt said. He smirked.

I stared down at my dress, at the crushed and dripping velvet. Sometimes my mother used to tell me—when I came home from school with a ketchup stain on a white shirt, or when she glanced into my room and saw herds of sweaters amassing on the floor—that I should take better care of my clothes. I'd never really cared that much, as clothes had always seemed replaceable. Now every grocery list and doodle on a Post-it and frozen pound cake and dress that my mother had
touched had a spell cast on it. She'd hugged me in this dress.

I burrowed my way through the crowd to the bathroom and stood by the sink rubbing the dress,
dry clean only
running through my head. Alex had mumbled to me earlier that night: “That's really nice that you're going out partying right after Mommy died.” I'd told her to go to hell, but a part of me had known that she was right. I'd justified it by thinking that I was only trying to make myself feel better.

After all, wasn't that what this was all about? The funeral, Manny Musico, the rabbi, the visitors and flowers and cards—wasn't everyone just trying to make us feel better? Of course, death was probably the only thing in the world that couldn't be made better. Obviously, she wasn't coming back.

I made my way through the crowd to Jay, who stood by the side of the stage, and told him I wanted to go.

“What happened? What's wrong?”

“Nothing. I'm just tired; I just want to go home.” I didn't really want to go home; I just couldn't think of anywhere else to go.

He drove me home. We barely spoke the whole way. I watched the sparse midnight traffic, listened to the groans of the subway overhead. On my stoop he leaned against the railing. “Hey—I hoped this would cheer you up. My mom thought it would be a good thing. I mean—you had fun, right?”

I nodded. I smelled like a keg. I didn't know going out had
been his mother's idea.

When I used to watch after-school specials I'd wanted to be that girl—the one the special was about, the girl with some terrible disease or the sufferer of some noble catastrophe. Pitied and loved. Of course in real life the pity, or whatever it was, was nothing like the way it seemed on the show; it resulted not in reverence but in something more like humiliation. I was ashamed of my family for having such bad luck. Who dies in twelve days?

He smiled and turned to go, then stopped. “Hey. I wanted to tell you. I'm real sorry you're so sad.”

“Oh. Thanks.” Sad? I wanted to tear my skin off or run screaming down the street.

“I wish I could help,” he said.

I stared at the red concrete of our stoop. “I just want someone to tell me what to do.”

“What?” he asked.

I meant that I wanted to know how you dealt with this, with the worst thing. “I mean . . . Forget it. See you in school,” I said.

“Okay. See you in school.”

I shut the door and walked into the silent emptiness of our house. It felt like a different house. There was nobody waiting up. The furniture looked old and worn, the floors dirty, the kitchen table barely visible beneath the pile of cards that needed to be answered. The flowers and flowers and flowers.

I went upstairs to my room. I didn't undress. I collapsed on my bed and listened to the cars whirring down our street, a fire engine squealing in the distance. I stayed awake for a long time, counting the spots on the ceiling where the paint had peeled off. After a while I got up and went into my parents' room.

My sister was already there. My father snored on my mother's old side of the bed; my sister slept in my father's spot.

I poked her. “Move over.” She grumbled unintelligibly and moved over an inch. I poked her again. She groaned and moved farther. I squeezed into the little slice of mattress, nudging her over, pulling the old flowered comforter up beneath my chin. I stared at the shadows on the ceiling that I'd stared at my whole life.

If she dies, I'll die.
But here we were.

History . . . isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.

—Cynthia Ozick

Trust
               

F
our days after the funeral, my father decided that Alex and I should go back to school. I was reading in bed when he knocked on my door, peered into my room, and repeated, as he'd been doing at regular intervals, like a public service announcement, that we needed to go back to the way things were before. On Monday he'd reopen his shoe repair shop, I'd return to the ninth grade, and Alex to the twelfth. Things had to go back to normal.

I stared up at him from my
Anne of Green Gables.
I was entranced by every orphan book I could find—
Heidi, Oliver Twist, The Secret Garden
—like they were company. The stream of visitors had petered out to just a few neighbors and the occasional oddity, such as Melody Bly, a religious girl in my class who had come in bearing a card signed by our homeroom and history teacher, Mr. Flag, and thirty-one classmates. The card had a huge gold cross on the front; at first glance I thought it was a plus sign. I'd barely ever spoken to Melody; she gave me a book called
The Five Stages of Grief,
filled with hazy photographs of silhouettes gazing out windows. I'd
stuck it on the kitchen table on top of all the other cards we'd received, with their wispy watercolor flowers, sunrises, beach scenes, and vague quotes in curlicue scripts.

        
Though a tree may lose its limb, new boughs will grow and shade the empty space.

        
Grieve but a day—spend your lifetime celebrating the love you shared.

        
Love . . . bright as sunshine.

        
Loss . . . large as the ocean deep.

        
Time . . . will heal your heartbreak.

        
Memories . . . will bring you peace.

“I got peanut butter,” my father said. He hovered in the doorway and gazed at me in my twin bed. “I'll make your lunch for tomorrow.” He never made my lunch; I made it myself. And he rarely came into my room. Though I'd hardly changed anything since I was ten, he looked around it now like he was seeing it for the first time: the mobile of satiny stars above my door; my shelf of Barbies, scantily clad in bikinis made from old tights; a poster of Rob Lowe with lipstick marks on his bare chest; the menagerie of stuffed animals I'd loved all my life, their fur matted, faces flat as pancakes from years of being slept on. In a sudden wash of maturity two
years ago I'd put them all in the closet, but in the last couple of weeks I'd taken them out and stationed them around my bed, like a plush army.

My father's eyes focused on a shelf by the window. A yahrzeit candle stood beside the Barbies. When Manny Musico had offered the candle to us my father had refused it, but as we were leaving I'd asked if I could have it. I hadn't known what a yahrzeit candle was, but I'd wanted it. I'd taken everything Manny offered us—the Schwartz Memorial Chapel stationery, the gold-embossed guestbook, the Hebrew prayer cards—all of it tucked into the Schwartz Memorial Chapel bag, like party favors.

The candle was still burning. The instruction booklet it came with said not to blow it out, that it would last for seven days to represent the formal mourning period. I'd been blowing it out at night anyway because I was afraid of burning down the house. And secretly I wanted it to last longer.

My father kept staring at the candle. He'd never been exactly euphoric over the idea of religion. He'd repeat “Religion Is the Cause of All the World's Ills” as often as “Don't Throw Out the Milk Without Letting Your Father Sniff It First.” His idea of marking Yom Kippur was to eat smoked kippers. My mother wasn't too fond of religion either—she and her best friend, Fanny, used to tell the story of how a Catholic friend in elementary school once suggested: “Let's go to your church and then to mine!” The Catholic church
had been filled with flowers, singing, smiling . . . and then they went on to my mother and Fanny's Orthodox synagogue, crowded with all the other German Jewish refugee families in Washington Heights who'd narrowly escaped the Holocaust. My mother had been a baby when she and her parents fled Berlin in 1939, on one of the last boats America let in; Fanny's family had come from Amsterdam. That day in the synagogue, the girls had to sit upstairs in the cold darkness, enduring the musty smell, listening to the solemn Hebrew words—they giggled until they got asked to leave.

Because of my parents' profound distaste for going to synagogue, and rarely taking me to one, my notion of the Jewish religion mainly revolved around food. Rosh Hashanah: apples and honey cake, for a sweet New Year. Yom Kippur: instead of the customary fasting to atone for your sins, we atoned with smoked fish in all its glorious variations, from the aforementioned kippers to sable to lox to whitefish to herring. Chanukah, the festival of lights and fried foods: latkes glistening with oil, applesauce and sour cream on the side. Passover: matzo sandwiches, matzo brei, and matzo ball soup to commemorate our ancestors' quick exodus from Egypt (no time for the bread to rise). According to Alex, our culinary version of Judaism meant we weren't Jewish at all. I maintained we were, though I wondered privately if she was right.

My father adjusted his glasses and leaned against the door. “You'll enjoy being back at school.”

I pictured my teachers, lined up like the cast of
The Addams Family,
their ghoulish faces cackling—Mrs. Petrosky, the sadistic Russian physicist; Mr. O'Grady, who sipped from a flask between classes and had a penchant for Korean girls; Mr. Tortolano, my English teacher, who, rumor had it, was an upstanding member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association; and Mr. Flag. Oh, Mr. Flag. Joe Randazzo, who sat next to me in history, circulated a drawing of Mr. Flag, appropriately named, his stiff facial expressions explained by a large flagpole up his rear end.

I couldn't imagine myself back in the classroom beside Melody and Joe and Petrosky and Flag. I hadn't exactly found my crowd at the Bronx High School of Science yet. Just girls like Eva Friedman and Lana Hernandez, who I hung out with at lunch and rode the train home with. I was waiting for a real best friend, someone who'd come into my life and share all my secrets, someone I could tell everything to, the way I used to with Lucy Gluckman. After the funeral, Eva's and Lana's eyes had searched me with a horrified fascination, as if my mother's death might show physically, like a huge wart or missing limb. “Uh, sorry,” Eva had said. Not that I knew what to say either. What could I say?
New boughs are growing. Memories are bringing me peace.

“You'll feel better once things are normal again,” my father said in the doorway.

He stared at the puffy stars dangling above his head and
pinched one, as if testing whether it was real. His glasses were as thick as storm windows, his face expressionless. “Stoneface,” my mother used to call him, in a not-so-joking tone. “Talk back! Speak to me!” she'd scream at him, and he'd slump on the couch and not respond. No matter what my parents talked about—the telephone bill, cleaning the gerbil cage, who'd bought the scratchy brand of toilet paper—they'd fight. They'd even fought in the hospital: my father wanted to bring my mother's parents to see her, and she refused. She'd never gotten along with her parents, and she didn't want to see them now. One afternoon my father had pulled my sister and me into the hospital corridor and said, “I'm bringing Omi and Opa.”

“Why?” I'd asked. My mother had seemed miserable enough already.

“Mommy doesn't understand Omi and Opa. That's the problem. She's never accepted all they've been through.”
All they've been through
hung in the air above us heavily, unexplained, like everything from my mother's life: her swastika-stamped birth certificate shoved in her dresser drawer; the space on the family tree my sister once drew for class, with question marks where our mother's aunts, uncles, and cousins should be. After several phone calls to my grandparents, Alex had found out a few facts to add—the places of death for our great-grandparents and two cousins. Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt. My grandparents didn't know the
dates. Alex penciled the concentration camp names in on her strange and stunted drawing, a sickly tree with empty limbs.

Omi and Opa still lived in Washington Heights, but they didn't get a chance to see my mother before she died. It had happened so surprisingly quickly—my father hadn't arranged their visit in time. At the funeral I'd stared at Omi beside me on the pew in her heaping wig, and Opa steadying himself with his cane; I'd wanted to extract my mother from them, whatever part of her that they held. They spoke little except for a few exchanges in German to each other.

My father called them nightly now. His own Polish-born parents were long dead, his aunts and uncles relocated to Yonkers; only my sister, father, and I remained in Queens, half a block down from where my father had grown up.

“I'll wake you up at six-fifteen,” he said, and shut the door. I groaned. I'd been sleeping until noon every day, waking in a coma-like state. I dreaded getting up when it was still dark, to wait on the icy 7 train platform for the hour-and-fifteen-minute subway ride to school. I hated being smushed in the train car with dozens of commuters sweating in their winter coats, grumbling in ten different languages, reaching desperately for the silver poles as the train squealed and tilted like it was about to topple off the tracks.

“I'm glad I'm going back,” Alex said during our nightly attack of the post-funeral food supply. She dug into a
half-destroyed strudel; I ate the frosting off a cupcake. “It's better than moping here.”

“I like moping.” I didn't want to face the level buzz of the lunchroom and the day packaged neatly into its eight periods, and I shuddered at the thought of seeing Jay Kasper; I hoped he hadn't told people about our pity date. But I wrapped up a cupcake and a piece of strudel to take to lunch the next day. My father made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

That night I dreamed I was back at school, telling everyone that my mom had died. In the dream they all said, “So what?”

The Bronx High School of Science is a sprawling 1950s architectural monstrosity of glass and red brick, several long, cold blocks from the Bedford Park Boulevard stop on the D train. It was early February; the wind whipped down the wide, deserted streets. I walked past the railway yard and Harris Field, which looked less like a field and more like an abandoned lot.

My first-period class was history. I settled into my assigned seat between Nagma Pawa and Joe Randazzo. We sat in welded-down rows, beside the barred windows. (Were they afraid we'd steal the desks, or jump out?) No one paid attention to me being back after the long absence. No one mentioned my mother. I felt partly relieved but partly disappointed. I didn't know what I'd expected, but I had expected something.
Alex would probably say,
Did you think you deserved a parade?

“Pearlman. Long time no see,” Joe said.

“Yeah,” I said.

Melody clicked over in her patent leather Mary Janes. She wore tiny silver cross earrings and a corduroy jumper. Her fashion taste lingered in the era of OshKosh and Underoos. “How are
you
?” she asked, gazing at me like she wanted to shrink-wrap me and take me home as her own grief specimen.

“Fine.” I took out my notebook, turned away from her, and started to doodle.

Mr. Flag took attendance. He looked like a businessman who'd wandered into the classroom on his way to the office. He wore suits with creased pants, pristine white shirts, and tasteful ties, unlike our other teachers. Their shirts seemed permanently untucked, the soles were peeling off their ratty sneakers, and their ties, on the rare occasions they wore them, featured smiling squirrels or dancing pencils. Mr. Flag revered the meticulous Delaney attendance-taking system—little pink and white cards, which he marked up with the four-colored pen he kept clipped to his inside pocket. I could see my card on his desk, scarred in red.

Mr. Flag was additionally unique in that he swore by the Study Skills Acquisition Program, color-coded packets that corresponded to our textbook, which required writing long, dull answers to longer, duller questions. In his thirty years of teaching in the New York City public school system, he told
us, he'd found this system incomparably effective. They made SSA cards for nearly every subject, and he didn't understand why more teachers didn't use them. If they'd made them for lunch and gym, he would've recommended those too.

Mr. Flag had Melody pass out the SSA cards and the school-owned
History of the World
textbook. I stared out the window, past the schoolyard, toward the subway. I wished I was back in bed reading
Anne of the Island.
Melody paused at my desk and told me we were still on Unit Five. I'd missed the second half of World War I, and now we were on World War II. She said I hadn't missed much.

As the class set to work on the current SSA card, Mr. Flag called me to his desk and handed me the stack of cards I'd missed. On the subway that morning, I'd worried that some teacher might single me out and make an embarrassing show of sympathy. Mr. Flag's distant, pained smile and his lack of mentioning anything about my mother's death, as if I'd been out with a cold, seemed worse. I sank back into my seat and stared blankly at the SSA cards in front of me.

I watched Melody return to her desk and dutifully scrawl out the answers to every dry question, like the rest of the class. I stared back out the window. Suddenly I heard Mr. Flag's voice. “Are you having a problem with the assignment, Miss Pearlman?”

I shook my head.

“Then you should be writing.”

I opened the book.
History of the World
was color-coded to go with the SSA cards. World War I was canary yellow, World War II a sky blue. I glanced over the long, thick, dry passages on governments, battle sites, statistics of lives lost. I turned the pages to look at the pictures. Red and yellow maps of countries' borders before and after the war. FDR in his wheelchair. A military army plane over the Pacific. Hitler at a podium, his moustache like a mistaken flick of a Magic Marker, a German banner waving behind him. Then, in the bottom right corner of the next page, the last photograph of the section: a concentration camp. Bodies, bone-thin, huddled, half alive, limbs strewn about so that you could not tell which belonged to whom. Then the chapter ended. The following page was electric orange, the beginning of Unit Six.