Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (4 page)

I’m glad she didn’t tell, because one of the things I admired the most about her was her refusal to go down. To let “them” see her pain. To let people feel bad for her.

•  •  •  •

Critics were hard on her, much harder than on male directors who did half as good work. This country likes to take down strong women. Everyone loved Hillary more after Bill cheated during his presidency. In her own campaign for president, her popularity spiked when she cried during the run-up to the New Hampshire primary. Martha Stewart was sent to jail to jeers of satisfaction. Michelle Obama, who could mow us all down with her intelligence, pretends to be all about motherhood. Defang the women: It’s a national pastime in which women are both the victims and collaborators.

Nora, in the most irritating way (to many people), came back from stuff. Carl Bernstein (her first husband) betrayed her when she was seven months pregnant. She wrote a bestseller about it,
Heartburn
, which became a movie. Then she fell in love with Nick and married
happily ever after.
Lucky Numbers
, a black comedy, and
Bewitched
put her in movie jail (what they call a director whom no one wants to hire). She wrote herself out of it with
Julie & Julia
.
Imaginary Friends
, an inventive and playful play, was insanely trashed. Even check out the reviews for the film we wrote together,
You’ve Got Mail
, which is beloved: begrudging. So regarding the outpouring of affection . . . because I am my sister’s sister, and my mother’s daughter, I have to point out the obvious. How easy for everyone now. Nora finally did something she can’t bounce back from. She died.

Nora and I were not huggers. We never greeted each other that way or often even with a kiss on the cheek. One day, when we left a doctor’s appointment—one of the first appointments about the thing we had been dreading for six years, that her disease had morphed into something dreadful—when we left that appointment at the hospital and walked along the curving driveway to the street, I linked my arm in hers. It was the first time in our lives that I had ever done so.

•  •  •  •

Somewhere in there, in the midst of the intense chaos that followed, the daily worries, the vigil, the relentless
caring and helplessness that had overtaken our lives, I realized my dog was chewing her paw and got a recommendation from my vet for a specialist. Here it was weeks later, Nora was dead, and Honey had a two o’clock appointment.

I was thinking about how Nora liked corn flakes while the vet took Honey’s history. When did her paw-chewing first start? Was it worse in certain seasons? Was it only one paw, was it occasionally other paws? Was she drinking more water?

I tried to focus. I couldn’t activate a search. “Does everyone know the answer to these?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I don’t.” I considered whether to mention my sister had died. How perfect. Nora never admitted her fatal disease, no excuse she shows up, and I am a second from blaming my bad dog-mothering on her.

The vet rattled on—did I want to rule out a bacterial infection versus a yeast infection (yeast being worse) for a hundred and twenty-five dollars more? I said yes—how could I not? The bliss of being a dog, of not knowing what you are in for, became abundantly clear as Honey, not realizing she was going for an unpleasant medical procedure, went happily into the elevator with the doctor.

While I waited, I hung out with Nora. I don’t mean I sensed her presence. I wish I had. She’s simply part of my consciousness, more or less lurking. I remembered Nora’s telling me she was good at tree pose. Tree pose is a yoga position.

Nora came very late to yoga, and when she told me she did it I found it hard to imagine. She didn’t like to do anything she couldn’t spin into multitasking. Nora looked so cute doing tree pose. To hold your balance, you have to focus on a point in the distance, some point, just fix on it, balance on one leg and bend the other so that your foot rests on your calf or thigh. Tree pose requires discipline, a quality she liked, as opposed to
shavasana
, that thing at the end of a yoga session where you lie on the floor and vegetate. I imagine Nora would have said, “Let’s skip that.”

The dermatologist returned. “Good news. Honey does not have a yeast infection. She has to go on a kangaroo diet.”

“What?”

“She has a food allergy, that’s the likely explanation, and she has to eat kangaroo.”

They make kangaroo into dog food? I don’t know what to say. You can eat kangaroo? Is that legal? I have to call Nora. Honey has to eat kangaroo.

Nora would love it. Or would she have loved it? Would she have been reading her e-mails while she talked to me? Would I have had a sudden sense that no one was at the other end of the line? She wasn’t really interested in dogs, while I could talk about dogs for the rest of my life. Still, usually when the conversation turns to dogs, you know the party is five minutes from being over.

When the conversation turns to dogs, you know the party is five minutes from being over.
Maybe Nora would have borrowed that line. Well, she won’t be doing that anymore, will she?

•  •  •  •

Now it’s fall and Honey no longer chews her paw. The doctor cured her. Sun Golds, the most perfect tomatoes in the world, are finished for the season and no longer for sale in the Union Square Greenmarket. Pumpkins are everywhere. It’s cool out. I’m wearing my leather jacket.

Once I mentioned to Nora that I wanted all my personal papers destroyed when I died, and she agreed in words to this effect—I am not quoting exactly, although I know her voice well enough to make it sound that way: “What is there left to say? I’ve said everything.”

Not hardly. Articles about her are continuing to pop
up everywhere, often with yet another adorable photo I’ve never seen before. I’ve begun to wonder if she is going to become the Jewish Marilyn Monroe.

W. H. Auden, who understands everything about the human condition, begins a poem about the loss of his lover with “Stop all the clocks.”

Yes, stop them for the people I love. For my sister. It would be the decent thing to do.

But the clocks keep ticking, insulting our grief, forcing us into new realities, cheering us up, making us laugh, taunting us with the possibility of forgetting, zapping us with the pain of remembering.

It was a privilege to see her out. Perhaps it’s obvious that being there is a privilege when you love someone, but I didn’t know that. It made me a tiny bit braver. About death.

That, I guess, was her last gift to me. Lopsided gift-giving if ever there was.

•  •  •  •

I am saddest when I go to Agata & Valentina, a market in my neighborhood with the most delicious food, and I wander the aisles around sundown thinking about what I want for dinner. Nora loved to think about what she
wanted for dinner. She should be here, buying some fresh mozzarella (salted), eyeing a sirloin, considering whether she wants crab cakes.

No, she wouldn’t be here. I mean, she would probably send someone out for something she fancied. It’s so hard not to know, only to be guessing. Right now I like to think she’s at her desk, waiting for my call or about to call me.

M
y twenties were one big walkabout.

There is, on television, a series called
Girls
about young women floundering in their twenties. It is written, directed, and acted by Lena Dunham, who is not on a walkabout. Nevertheless, she captures the very special misery of being in your twenties. Of being clueless, desperate, lost. Looking for love, settling for crazy. Grabbing at solutions because they are solutions, just not to your problem. Being in your twenties has changed a lot since I was in my twenties, but it is still a time when everything awful that happens is awful in a romantic way, even if you don’t admit it (and you can’t admit it because then you would be less important in the tragedy
you’re starring in, your own life) . . . because in your twenties you know, even if you don’t admit this either, even if this is buried deep in your subconscious, that you can waste an entire decade and still have a life.

College did not prepare me for anything. At Barnard I majored in European history because my roommate, brilliant at history, always accurately guessed the exam essay questions. That is really the only reason. It was the easy way out. As I write this, I am struck by how shallow I was. A truly empty-headed thing. I was quick with a comeback, but a comeback is most emphatically not knowledge. Also when I was at Barnard, a European history major, unlike a political science or English major, was not required to take comprehensives, a general examination in your major at the end of your senior year. I knew I would flunk comprehensives. I retained nothing.

Recently I found a paper I wrote in college. “The Causes of the Franco-Prussian War.” I got a B on it. I wondered if I pulled an all-nighter writing it. If I took NoDoz. If Susan, my roommate, told me the causes and I parroted her. Today all I know about this war is who fought it, and
that
is only because of the war’s name. I wasn’t interested in European history. It didn’t cross my mind—this is so basic, it’s embarrassing—that I was supposed to major in something I was interested in.

This is probably my mother’s fault. Isn’t everything your mother’s fault in some way? At this point in life I forgive her everything and besides am deeply grateful to her, but she picked all my high school classes: two years of Latin, three of French, four of English and history, journalism as an elective. No science except what was absolutely required. Or art. She was raising writers. She had stern notions of what constituted an education for her daughters.

However, no one ever asked me—no parent, no teacher, no high school or college counselor—“What are you interested in studying?” I didn’t connect interest with school. Or passion with school. In high school, the only class I liked was journalism. Not because I was writing. Because, for some reason, at Beverly Hills High School—a privileged place if ever there was, with its very own oil well polluting the environment and a basketball court whose floor parted in the center (if someone pushed a button or pulled a crank or lever) and retracted under bleachers to reveal a swimming pool—at this very fancy public school there was a linotype machine.

We’re talking pre-computer age here. Whenever you read a book, a newspaper, a magazine, it was because the words were set with actual lead type. The linotype man would type my stories. The machine would convert
my words to metal type, slugs of which, as I recall, came sliding down a shoot. Lead type is heavy. If you carried a lot of type in your shoulder bag—not that you would—it would break your shoulder. How wonderful that it was heavy, that I could hold words in my hand and they had weight. I was the front-page editor, and Thursday nights I would go to the typesetting building next to the gym, collect my type, and arrange the page as I had designed it. After tightening the frame to hold the type in position, I would ink the whole shebang, place paper on top, and roll a heavy roller over it to get an impression. Then I would proofread my page, replace typos with new type, and take a final proof. It was the most fun in the world. It was craft satisfaction. Craft satisfaction comes from actually making something with your hands. In terms of education, it is practically obsolete.

In college the only thing that interested me was dating. Being in love. In the library I had a reward system: ten minutes of studying, ten of daydreaming. Mostly about whatever boy I was obsessed with, reliving the last weekend, planning the next. I have to say college completely cooperated here. Classes provided no competition for my yearnings. I took a course in plays, a foray out of history. We had to read a play a night. Strindberg, Ibsen, O’Casey, O’Neill, Wilder, went whizzing by. It’s hard to
read a play. Seriously hard to understand what is happening, what the playwright intends. Reading one a night was ludicrous. I still have trouble reading them, still have trouble now and then figuring out what the hell is going on. The final exam was a slew of multiple-choice questions. There was one about pork chops, which went something like this: “In which of these plays did pork chops figure?” All I knew about pork chops was, at my house, they came breaded with applesauce on the side. I had no idea what play featured pork chops. I still don’t, but I remember the question. It was ridiculous. I retained ridiculous.

Modern Poetry was similar. Wednesday Wallace Stevens, Friday Ezra Pound. A person could spend a lifetime trying to understand Stevens, and Pound is mind-bendingly obtuse. In Medieval History, there was so much required reading, all in books the professor had written, that no one could accomplish it, especially someone like me who had required daydreaming. I did love Art History. I have never met anyone who didn’t. I still remember the rush I got from correctly identifying a geometric shape at the bottom right corner of a Picasso as a cornucopia.

I hope kids are smarter about college now and colleges are smarter about educating them. I am longing to
believe it (especially given how much college costs). When I was there, the sheer volume of homework made learning or getting excited about learning a steep uphill climb. My husband insists, even though I don’t admit it, that I
was
learning—to think better, research, organize information, meet the demands of a deadline. At Connecticut College, where I spent two years before Barnard in small classes, that might have been true. But still I was wasting my parents’ money. Wasting it big-time. It was, in retrospect, the life of a spoiled girl.

Getting married was a big part of my fantasy life. There was a card game called Old Maid that we played as kids. Each card had a partner card except one. The loser would be stuck with a card depicting a funny-looking gray-haired woman with glasses and a hat. The hat was especially sad—sort of a pillbox with a fake flower in it. Old Maid the card game struck terror in me. I was a superstitious kid, and getting left with that card seemed prophetic. There was also a song that freaked me out: “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” Ella Fitzgerald sang it (quite inappropriately, in my opinion) on a record of Christmas songs. When the record (what we now call
vinyl
, and why do we, it’s so pretentious) got to that song, I would pick up the needle, very carefully so as not to scratch the record, and skip it to the next song. I couldn’t
bear to listen to it if I didn’t have a date. Not having a date on New Year’s Eve was like being an old maid. It was being an old maid every year.

This absurd hysteria about New Year’s Eve stayed with me for much longer than I’d like to admit. Whenever I read about how people in their twenties don’t date anymore, they travel in hordes, it makes me happy. Maybe this group thing has taken the sting out of New Year’s Eve.

So, on the one hand, my mother was drilling me daily from the time I could hold a spoon: “You will have a career like me. You will work. You will be a writer. You will leave Los Angeles. You will go to New York City. You will work. Career, career, career.” On the other hand—driving me as powerfully with no help from her—was simply wanting love.

I blame this on the movies. I blame it on one movie in particular:
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
.

There were lots of messages keeping women domestic then, every message actually—lack of opportunity, advertising, the women’s magazines like
McCall’s
,
Ladies’ Home Journal
,
Redbook
,
Seventeen
, which glorified the stay-at-home wife and which I devoured each month when they arrived at our house. But really the thing counteracting my mother’s teaching, trumping it, was a
singing and dancing 1950s romantic comedy starring pert blond Jane Powell.

In
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
, Jane Powell is the cook at a roadhouse in a Wild West town when Howard Keel, big and handsome, rides in, shaves while he sings, samples her stew, and proposes. This is my favorite line: When he asks for catsup, she replies, “My stew can stand on its own feet.” She agrees to marry him—it’s love at first sight for her—and he takes her to his ranch in the backwoods, where she discovers he has six uncivilized (but sweet) brothers. It turns out she was looking for love, but he was looking for a servant. Boy, did I want to be that servant. Lucky Jane. She gets to rise at dawn, make flapjacks, eggs, bacon, biscuits, and coffee for eight (including her), wash their filthy clothes, and teach them to dance. Once cleaned up, they are gorgeous, and then—excuse me for telling the plot of this movie I love as much as I love my dog—she takes them to a barn raising, where they meet other town girls and fall in love. Those girls, however, are promised to less attractive town boys who wear stiff suits with dorky stitching on the lapels, while the brothers wear britches with wide leather belts and cool blousy shirts. The barn-raising musical number, choreographed by Michael Kidd, a dance-off between
the townies and the brothers, is the greatest dance sequence in a movie ever. In my opinion.

The brothers return to the backwoods heartsick, so heartsick they can barely lift a pitchfork of straw. At Howard Keel’s urging—stirring them to action as only a song can—they return one night and kidnap the women. A cute kidnapping, if you consider putting a bag over the head of someone you love cute. My favorite kidnap-cute from the film is not the bag-over-the-head, but this: When one young woman sets a hot pie on the windowsill to cool, she is whisked right out the window. I don’t want to tell you the end of this movie in case you haven’t seen it, although given the title, you can probably guess.

The movie came out when I was ten, and by the time I was twenty, I had seen it sixteen times. The last viewing was in Madrid. There were no subtitles, but it didn’t matter because I knew it by heart.

It is the only movie of which I have counted my viewings. All sixteen were in one movie theater or another. I can’t emphasize how important this is. Watching a movie in a theater is to enter a dream state. In
The Purple Rose of Cairo
, Woody Allen perfectly captures the transporting power of film. When Mia Farrow goes to the movies and is captivated by the glamorous world so different
from the dismal small life she is living, her yearning is so great that the hero on-screen is pulled right out of his cinematic reality into her prosaic one.

I was young and vulnerable and innocent when I first saw
Seven Brides
. I took my heart into that theater and lost it.

Loving a movie is not about logic. If a movie “gets” me, I forgive it anything. If it doesn’t, I sit there cold, critical, poking holes. I’m amazed that many sane people claim that violent movies don’t make people more violent. This seems the delusional, self-serving justification of people who make violent movies. If violence excites you, a violent movie will nurture that. It must. Movies invite you to dream, change your dreams, become your dreams. Recently I was reading in the
New York Times
about Aton Edwards, a leader of the Prepper movement. Preppers are people who spend a lot of time preparing to survive a catastrophe, natural or terrorist, that results in an all-systems failure (banks, phones, food, transportation, breathing, whatever). Mr. Edwards said he went to see the movie
Deliverance
when he was ten years old . . . went in, according to the article, a fairly regular kid and emerged a Prepper.

“Ten” did pop out at me. I was ten when
Seven Brides
overwhelmed, seduced, and altered my life. He was ten
when he saw
Deliverance
. I asked a developmental psychologist about ten. A big year, it turns out, when children first begin to think for themselves, entertaining ideas different from what their parents tell them. Budding sexuality, too. First feelings.
Deliverance
has a male rape in it—no wonder Edwards emerged a Prepper. I’m surprised more men didn’t, but then it had an R rating. Ten-year-old Aton Edwards never should have been in that theater.

I do wonder if you spend your life preparing for disaster if you are disappointed if a disaster doesn’t happen. If you are hoping for a disaster so you haven’t wasted your time or can prove you’re right or can finally have the adventure you crave or get to watch everyone else go down while you inflate your raft, load it up with gas masks and cans of tuna fish, and sail off Manhattan island (row, actually—row across the Hudson to New Jersey, are they kidding?).

The impact of
Seven Brides
was undoubtedly greater because I saw it in a theater as opposed to on a DVD, as opposed to lying on a bed, where I can say to whomever I’m watching with, “Would you please pause it? I want to get an apple.”

As for romantic films being denigrated as chick flicks, consider this. My adolescent yearnings aside, when
you’re looking for love, aspiring to love, hoping for love, dreaming of love, movies are where it seems possible. When you’re past the “falling” phase and in the calmer yet more complicated “being in love” (assuming you’re committed to it), the only place you ever fall in love again is at the movies.

That is no small thing.

I blame my entire twenties walkabout on
Seven Brides
. On hoping some man was going to whisk me out a window and in the spring we would be singing with little baby lambs on our laps. (That happens, too, in
Seven Brides
. Oh God, I really do hope I haven’t ruined the movie for you. I haven’t even mentioned the fantastic sequence when the lonely brothers in the dead of winter sing “I’m a lonesome polecat.” There, I’ve mentioned it. Although there is no ruining this movie. Trust a woman who has now seen it thirty times or more. I did eventually stop counting.)