Cures for Heartbreak (3 page)

Everyone scribbled the assignment.

I stared at the page with its sky-blue border, the black-and-white photograph. I'd seen dozens of pictures and movies about the Holocaust and the camps before, of course. I'd read
The Diary of Anne Frank
and watched Holocaust movies-of-the-week on TV despite my mother's disdain. She never watched them. I was curious, and guilty for being curious. The books and movies never satisfied the curiosity; they never seemed real. Did Anne Frank mean it when she wrote that people were good at heart? Did she feel that after her family had been found, after she'd been taken to Bergen-Belsen?

My mother had met Anne's father, Otto Frank. He'd been
friends with the Gluckmans, Fanny's parents, and my mother had been invited to dinner several times when Otto Frank was there. My mother was about ten years old. What was he like? I asked her, proud and envious. She shrugged. She said he seemed nice. It was before the diary had been published. She said he was thin and quiet, like everybody else.

I kept staring at the photograph. The silence of my mother's life became even greater right then, as I looked at the picture. She'd rarely spoken of what happened to her family during the war; she'd tried to shelter us from it. She'd wanted being Jewish just to be the songs for us, the food, but it couldn't be—those couldn't be separated from everything else. Her sheltering, her silence, had told us something darker just the same. My back prickled, my face grew hot. I stopped seeing the picture in the book and instead saw my family: my grandparents' eyes when they gazed at my sister and me playing, as if they'd never seen children do that before. My mother, digging her fingernails into my shoulder when she heard German spoken on the bus. Jamming her tote bag full of food and supplies, to be prepared “for anything.” Calling the police after hearing fireworks one August night, waking my sister and me, thinking New York was being bombed.

This tiny photograph in the book, with no names, no explanations, no descriptions of who the bodies were, how they got there, if their families survived—this one chapter with its color-coded sections and corresponding questions—wasn't
what my family had experienced. This book was about a one-event history, the kind of disaster that begins and ends, with no aftereffects, no reverberations. Not the kind of history that seeps in slowly and colors everything, like a quiet, daily kind of war, the war that my mother and my family lived through, which lived through them, which never ended.

I thought about my mother in the hospital, telling me that she'd always known this would happen, that she would die like this, that all her life she'd been waiting. Even that night of the diagnosis, behind the surprised smile had been something else: a knowing, an expecting.

And the shock was that hints of this had been dropped all my life—hadn't I read
Anne of Green Gables
and
Oliver Twist
for the first time, long before the diagnosis, with the same hunger with which I read them now? We'd only known my mom had cancer for twelve days, but the doctors said it could've been growing in her, undetected, for over twenty years. I wondered if that was the cause behind her years of vaguely identified allergies, asthma, colds; her days in bed; the darkness of her room, of every room in our house; her face buried in her hands; the crook of her elbow shielding her eyes. She had kept piles and piles of lists, reminding herself to do everything in a frantic, uneven script. We had repeated “I love you” to each other daily, incessantly, because my worst fear had always been that I would come home one day and find out she'd died, and she wouldn't know how much I loved her.
We said it so often, I used to be afraid that someone outside of my family would catch my mother and me in a desperate “I love you”—or that I might accidentally say one to someone else. I'd even considered it superstitious—but it wasn't, I could see now. It was that I sensed, even then, how fragile and uncertain my mother's life was. That the hole her death left had begun forming a long, long time ago.

I stared out the barred windows to the cement schoolyard. I hadn't answered one question, not only on this card but on any in the stack. I hadn't even faked it, writing notes to friends like others did. My stark white notebook lay wide open, my pencil across the blank page.

The classroom was quiet. Mr. Flag watched me with a starched smile. “Miss Pearlman, if you're having problems with the blue section, you can go back and work on the yellow.”

I couldn't turn the page. I sat frozen in my seat, transfixed by the picture; I couldn't look forward or backward or do anything but stay there, staring at the bodies, unknown, intertwined, tossing, their bodies, my mother's body, me.

A bell rang, the end of the period. Books slapped shut, assignments passed forward, notebook paper tore. I didn't move. I kept looking at the picture, and it seemed to me that the worst thing that could happen in the world right then would be to send my book forward like everyone else and pretend that it was just a photo in a book, in World History, Unit
Five, and nothing else. As if the war was the kind of thing you could print in a color-coded textbook, shut at the end of the lesson, and give back.

Melody stood at the front of each row to collect the assignments and textbooks. I heard them flapping around me, moving forward.

Mr. Flag stared at me, impatient. “Miss Pearlman, are you going to pass your book in?”

The books lay in a neat stack on the first desk of our row, and Melody moved them into a pile on the windowsill. I couldn't move.

“Miss Pearlman, pass your book in, please.”

He whispered something to Melody, and her patent leather Mary Janes clicked on the floor. I didn't know what I was going to do. I picked the book up. It felt surprisingly light in my hands. As Melody walked toward me, with Mr. Flag's stark face behind her, his fingers bent stiffly over his pink and white Delaney card system, each card filed into its neat compartment without a thought as to who existed in each one, his face with its expression of perpetual annoyance, like we were an incurable breed of disorder, disruption, and lost causes, the last thing I could do was place that book in Melody's hand. She was smiling, the same smile she'd had when she handed me the grief book, the five distinct stages I hadn't entered or passed and, it seemed now, never would.

She was still smiling when I threw the book at the window.
The window was open, and it hit the metal bars with a loud clang, then clapped on top of the sill as the pages flurried open. The class flinched all at once. Mr. Flag did too, and though his features reassumed their rigid position and his face admitted hardly a change, the sound continued to ring in the silent classroom afterward.

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.

—M. F. K. Fisher
           

The Gastronomical Me

W
hen my midterm grades arrived, I considered various ways to shield them from my father:
Oh, there are no grades this year,
I could say, or
U does not mean unsatisfactory, it means ultraperfect.
Or else I could spill ketchup on strategic spots. I'd stopped going to history class altogether in favor of sleeping late, and I often slept through my second-period English class as well. But it turned out that the report card didn't matter after all—that night, my father had a heart attack.

“It's probably nothing, just too many baked beans at dinner,” was how he'd initially described his chest pains as our taxi careened over the 59th Street Bridge and on to New York University Medical Center. It was April, three months after my mother died; a freak snowstorm had hit the city a few days before, and its slushy gray remains still lurked on the corners. Within hours we learned he would have to stay in the hospital for monitoring and tests, and in a week would undergo triple bypass. It was his second heart attack; his first had been when he was thirty-five, before I was even born.

During those days before the bypass surgery, I lived off ice cream. It was the only appealing thing in the hospital cafeteria. I wasn't the only one who ate it—I recognized the other visitors from the fifteenth floor, all of us standing beside the soft-serve machine, Styrofoam bowls extended, globbing on fudge, sprinkles, and whipped cream in some speechless camaraderie. Nobody cried openly in the hospital; we just stuffed our misery behind magazines, rumpled newspapers, and meals of dessert. I buried myself behind
Cardiovascular Surgery and Your Family,
the blue pamphlet the doctors had given us, and tried to convince myself that my father would be all right.

Doctors, relatives, and friends assured Alex and me that he'd be fine—bypass surgery was so common now that it was practically routine, they said—but each night I'd watch my sundae dissolve, not wanting to return to his room, to the tubes flowing from his body like plastic vines, the heart monitor exposing every wobbly beat, the electric clamps poised against the wall like a pair of praying hands.
A common procedure,
I'd repeat to myself, and then wallow in a melted pool of cookies 'n' cream.

I was sitting in a far corner of the cafeteria three days before the surgery when one of my father's doctors, an intern, approached me. “Can I join you?” he asked.

I nodded. I'd seen him dozens of times in the past week, whenever the team of doctors came into my father's room on
their three-minute rounds, all of them inspecting my father's body and rattling off medical terms like a secret code. We'd never spoken. None of the doctors ever spoke to Alex and me; they glanced in our direction and smiled warily, as if we were the unfortunate audience of an unrehearsed show.

He introduced himself and we shook hands. I stared at his ID tag, like the kind factory workers wore: Richard E. Bridgewald. His face looked small and young in the little photo, overwhelmed by the white plastic around it. I searched his white coat for some sign of personality, some clue as to who he was—a monogrammed pen in his shirt pocket, a distinctive watch, a ring—but there was nothing.

Richard unloaded a salad, sandwich, and a glass of orange juice from his tray. “Where's your family?” he asked.

Family
seemed an overly optimistic term for Alex, my father, and me. Most recently, Alex and I'd argued over which subway stop was closest to our house; that morning we'd huffed off to the 46th Street and 52nd Street stations separately.

“My sister's upstairs with our father,” I said. I didn't know if I should mention that our mother was dead. I still wasn't used to saying the word
dead
out loud. I felt half disgusted and half fascinated by the word, as if it was a new, forbidden curse:
dead,
the real and unreal sound of it, absorbing and repelling, like a horror movie.
Night of the Living Dead. The Dead Return.
My father used the euphemisms—
she's gone,
she passed away
—which, my sister pointed out with her usual delicacy, sounded like his
Excuse me, I just passed wind.
“Say
fart,
Dad,” she'd demand.

“My mother died here—in this hospital—in January.”

Richard rearranged his lettuce leaves. “I know—it's on your father's record. I'm sorry.”

I nodded, surprised. What else did he know about me? I pictured the doctors whispering about us in the back halls, the staff elevator:
The Pearlman daughters, they're regulars here.
I often stared at the doctors, settled in their roped-off section like a flock of tired geese; I imagined mini-plots secretly unfolding among them, like on hospital TV shows. Sometimes I even peeked into staff lounges and restricted rooms, hoping to see doctors and nurses getting it on, orderlies in a fistfight, or patients screaming bloody murder. But nobody kissed, and no one fought. Even the emergency room, where my father had been that first night, had seemed surprisingly sedate: a kid with a button stuck up his nose, and lots of sleeping old people.

Why had Richard sat down with me? There were other families of his patients in the cafeteria. I studied his face. From time to time he glanced at me, between swallows, and there was an expression in his eyes I'd seen before—sad, almost regretful. It was how my mother's oncologist had gazed at us when he told us there was nothing more he could do for her. My sister had started sobbing while I'd stared at him blankly,
stupidly. He'd wrapped an arm around my sister's shoulders; it looked strange, the sudden touching, mistaken and accidental, like a dancer falling.

I put down my spoon. “My dad's dying, isn't he?”

“No.” He laughed nervously. “No. I didn't mean for you to think that. It's just—you looked worried here, all alone.”

“I'm not worried,” I lied, stirring my dissolving whipped cream.

“I was thinking, maybe with someone to talk to you probably wouldn't be so anxious about it all.”

At first I thought by “someone to talk to” he meant himself, but he went on, “We have a great social work staff. Usually they talk to the patient and family when the case is terminal, but I was thinking because of your mother, we could have someone talk to you and your sister.”

I thought of the social worker assigned to us while my mother was dying; he'd taken notes while she vomited in the bathroom. “I don't think—”

“It could be a real help. To you and your father. Usually families don't realize the kind of power they can have.” He gently prodded a tomato with his fork. “Although your father's already lucky, with a daughter like you. Seems like you're at the hospital every night.”

I wondered if he knew I spent more time leafing through the Harlequin Romances in the gift shop than in my father's room.

“He's lucky to have you,” he repeated, smiling.

Suddenly, I knew why he'd sat down with me: in the last couple of months I'd been looking much older than I usually did. Yesterday a businessman had handed me his card on the 7 train, trying to pick me up; the cashier at the corner deli had asked where I went to college; a nurse had mistaken me to be older than Alex. My expanded morning routine was paying off—I'd been spending nearly two hours getting ready each day. I'd settle in front of my mother's lighted Clairol makeup mirror and curl my hair with her Style Pro. I applied her Estée Lauder Nude Mood eye shadow and Cool as Coral lipstick. I wallowed through her closets, plunging my hands into the silk shirts, sniffing the wools that still held her smell. Some of her clothes still had the tags on; I clipped them off and wore them. My father and sister hadn't noticed, and I was thankful—I didn't think they'd be pleased. After we'd picked out a dress for the burial my father had shut her closet doors with a certain finality, like closing a shrine.

“After you talk to the social worker, we can meet here so you can tell me how it went,” Richard said. “Do you usually eat at this time?”

“Yes.” I felt a sweet sort of chill. How old could Richard be? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? It wasn't so much: my friend Lucy's parents had been nine years apart, my grandparents fifteen. And lately age had begun to seem like a vague, immeasurable thing, like when I saw Mrs. Kopecki,
our neighbor who lived in a basement apartment across the street, for the first time after my mom had died.
I've never lost someone close to me, I can't imagine,
Mrs. Kopecki had said, suddenly distant and quiet.
Oh, you manage, you do,
I'd said, comforting her.

“What do you think? Should I arrange it?” he asked.

I nodded. It wasn't faith in the social worker that made me agree, but the knowledge that this would be a repeated thing, this shared meal. I ate breakfast alone on the subway platform and had stopped bringing my lunch to school; I bought cookies and Munchos at the snack truck across the street instead. Alex and I rarely ate together; she refused to even enter the hospital cafeteria, preferring to bring her beloved Turkish meat and spinach pies from the Turkiyem store near our house and gnaw on them in the solarium. But what a difference it made to eat leisurely, pleasantly, with somebody new—the clinking of their fork, their happy munching, the questions and glances, the whole fact of them beside you. When Richard and I finished and placed our trays on the conveyor belt, for the first time in weeks I felt full.

“I feel good,” my father told Gina Petrollo, the social worker. “I feel great. I'll live till I'm eighty—another fifty-five years.” He grinned at his own joke.

Gina laughed, her red nails clicking on the windowsill. Alex and I couldn't stop staring at her. Her butt mushroomed
out of her white suit like a detachable cushion; her hair sprayed in black whirls from her barrette. She spoke with a Long Island accent, like the girls with teased hair and gold jewelry we saw in the dressing rooms of Filene's Basement, fighting over discounted panty hose. Richard had told me, when he'd come by with the team of doctors earlier that afternoon, that the woman assigned to us was known as the best on the staff.
You can tell me how it went at dinner tonight,
he'd said, and all afternoon I'd been cradling the thought of dinner, like a secret. While I pretended to do my biology homework, I'd scrawled
Richard Bridgewald
in different handwritings in the margins of my notebook. I added up the letters in our names to see if we were eternally fated to be together. It worked out.

Alex leaned toward me and whispered, “She wears even more makeup than you do.”

“Her butt's even bigger than yours,” I said.

“Up yours.”

“Up
yours
.”

“Girls,” my father warned, “I can't hear Miss Petrollo speak. And you're disturbing Mr. Grossman.” Morty Grossman was the nearly comatose man in the next bed whom my father had befriended. He befriended everyone in the hospital, as if it was a big social club.
It's better than the Howard Johnsons here,
he'd said.
I get my TV, my
Times,
my Sanka, the river view.
And now he was offering Gina some coffee, like she was a guest in our home.

“The girls are always like this, kvetching,” he told Gina. “But they're smart kids—my older daughter here, she's the mathematician and scientist. She won the Westinghouse science competition.”

“Dad,” Alex groaned.

He grinned at me. “The younger daughter wrote a book that's in the school library.”

“That was, like, fourth grade,” I said, staring down at the floor, wondering why he always had to refer to us in the third person.

“What a great book. What was it called?” He looked toward me, but I pretended I didn't remember.

“
Smelly the Blue Sock, Superdetective,
” Alex volunteered.

“A great book,” he reassured Gina.

I shook my head. He was acting so differently than he had when my mother was in the hospital. She'd put off the chemo three days, though the doctors told her it was her only chance; when my father and the doctors pressured her into doing it, she grew even sicker—she threw up, stopped eating, was barely conscious enough to speak until she died.
She's handling it all wrong,
our father had said to Alex and me when our mother wanted to stop taking the chemo.
She's weak. She can't cope.
The words still echoed in me, rolling into a tangled ball of anger, but I couldn't stay angry at him. Even before he went into the hospital, whenever I'd tried to be mad at him he'd suddenly say or do something unbearably loving,
like when he explained why he'd been coming home so late after work:
I've been stopping by the cemetery to talk to Mommy,
he'd said.
To tell her about you girls, and the shop.
He'd said it so deadpan, so matter-of-factly, in his quiet, plain way, that his love for us stunned me, it was so constant and overwhelming.

Gina turned to Alex and me. “Why don't we talk in the solarium, so we can let your father and Mr. Grossman get some rest?” She spoke slowly, like she was teaching new vocabulary on
Sesame Street.

We followed her butt to the solarium. I stared at the nondescript paintings on the walls, the wispy pastels. In the far corner a man snored on the leather couch; a woman in a wheelchair gaped out the window.

“You have such a nice family,” Gina said.

We shrugged.

She scrawled something on her clipboard, as if we'd already answered wrong. “How do you feel about your father's surgery?”

Alex and I gazed at each other. “Okay,” Alex said. “I mean, he's going to be all right, isn't he? That's what everyone keeps saying. We shouldn't be upset, right?”

“No, you shouldn't be,” Gina said, smiling like a Crest ad. “Have you been feeling upset, Mia?”

I wasn't sure how to answer. I was embarrassed by the worries I had—as if they were paranoid or pessimistic. The hospital was like a perpetual purgatory, a holding place where
all doubts and questions were frozen off, sucked into the sterilized, cotton-ball walls. It was as if no one wanted to admit that people actually died here. Everyone had been optimistic at first with my mother, too.