“Step away,” she says to herself firmly. “Step away from the self-pity.”
The thing to do, and she will, is to call her mother, a woman who embraced her later-life singlehood, years ago, with grace, even a wry sort of cheer. Merry’s mother is a model of fortitude. She will know, the minute she hears Merry’s voice, that her daughter is distressed. Without prying—though Merry could tell her about almost anything—she will calm Merry down. Calm is essential. Calm and then a plan.
—
The engine ticks as it cools. She holds the keys in her lap but does not reach to open the door. Through the row of dogwoods between the studio and the garage, the pool’s slick cover glares darkly in the sun, as if indignant at being ignored.
Tommy cannot seem to get out. She keeps glancing at, then looking away from, the box on the passenger seat. It sits, unceremoniously, on top of the day’s mail (dozens of pastel-colored envelopes: the tide of condolence continues to rise).
She heard little to nothing of what the funeral director said after handing her the mahogany box containing Morty’s ashes. She does recall his giving her a plain, unmarked envelope—which she knows contains the receipt for all the charges associated with the “cremains”—and her subsequent refusal of a shopping bag in which to carry the box. (“How eco-smug we are,” Morty would say whenever they remembered to shop with their own bags, a collection of colorful totes foisted on them at bookshops and literary festivals.)
Finally she gets out. She goes around the car to retrieve the box, balancing the bundled mail on top. In the house, she sets it on the kitchen table. She hasn’t thought about where to put it or even, in the long run, whether she should open it and spread the ashes, bury it, or regard it as a portentous keepsake, a lead box containing a radioactive jewel. Morty left no wishes about what to do with his remains; cremation itself was a guess, based on casual remarks like “Someday, when I’m nothing but a heap of ashes…”
The junk mail she always discards at the post office. At home, she separates the true mail into personal and business, then the personal into letters addressed to Morty and those addressed to her. Normally, by far the greater share would be Morty’s, and while the flow of generic fan letters has hardly dried up, letters and cards to Tommy have begun to proliferate. Among them, she recognizes Dani’s awkward script immediately. She forces herself to open it first.
Dear Toms,
I saw the news. That’s sad. Jane and I want you to know we’re thinking of you. What a shock. When I was with you and Morty in the fall, he seemed in great shape.
We’re all okay if pretty sleep deprived (me and Jane, that is). Joe is growing like a weed. Maybe it’s my imagination, but he’s looking like Dad. Definitely the eyes.
Call sometime if you like. You know where we are. Jane sends a hug.
Yours,
Dani
So now it’s on Tommy to close the rift, isn’t it? She can’t help feeling annoyed, however unfairly. All his life, Dani has stirred up in Tommy a strange stew of exasperation, concern, and guilt.
Tommy was, typical of eldest children, the obedient one, the good student, the make-no-waves, so-mature-for-her-age daughter of hardworking parents. Dani wasn’t exactly the opposite—he did nothing malevolent or hurtful—but he was a boy’s boy, restless and prone to inadvertent trouble, a shirker of homework and curfews. Their mother was always telling him—in her liberal-pacifist-we-love-you-no-matter-what tone of voice—how worried she was that he wouldn’t find his way in the world if he couldn’t take school seriously.
“Or just find your passion. God knows even your daydreamy sister is passionate about her books, and I’m sure she’ll find a way to make hay of that passion, even if she doesn’t make a lot of money. Because life is not about money, and neither is happiness! As your father and I have always tried to show you by example. We are well off because we know how lucky we are to have what we do. Most of all, the two of you.”
Dani’s teenage resistance took the benign form of turning sullen, resistant to communication. Back-talking, with which their friends could so readily enrage their own parents, only made Mom or Dad sit Dani down for a “centering talk” or some “collective deep breaths.” Even when he discovered Pink Floyd and Aerosmith, and tried to deploy their music as a blaring form of disrespect, a pointed pushback to his father’s hallowed blowin’-in-the-wind, let’s-be-Woody-’n’-Arlo nostalgia, that backfired, too.
“Sit me down, Danilo, and help me get an ear for this music,” their father said one evening over dinner. “I want to be enlightened. I mean it!” (Never mind that Dani’s music drove Tommy nuts.)
At the time, Tommy took it for granted how “all-accepting” her parents were—even after Dani was suspended for spray-painting the back wall of a local school with a group of devil-may-care (but hardly delinquent) friends. It wasn’t as if they covered that wall with obscenities; they simply mounted a battle cry for freedom, painting in large, sloppy letters something like RIZE UP 2 REBEL! or YOUTH REBELZ ROOL! Juvenile, insipid stuff. He had just started his senior year in high school.
Dani’s mother, after picking him up from the precinct, told him that she was glad he had the urge to express himself, but he needed to “channel it differently.” All this she reported to Tommy over the phone. Tommy had been working for Morty, at his apartment, for two years. She was twenty-four and had just saved enough to rent a studio in the East Village.
Tommy was content to listen to her mother’s all-suffering complaints, and then Mom said, “So your dad and I have a proposal.” In an effort to separate Dani from his circle of what she called “overly expressive” friends, they came up with the notion of paying part of Tommy’s rent in exchange for having Dani live with her during the week so that he could attend a more liberal high school up in Manhattan, perhaps even make a more promising set of friends. On weekends, he would return to Brooklyn.
Ever the obedient daughter, Tommy said yes. Because she spent long days working at Morty’s place, often staying till six or seven, Dani met her there after school, instead of going back to her apartment—which was dark as well as cramped. Morty’s place occupied the top two floors of a brick town house. The lower level had been sculpted into an open, loftlike space, airy and colorful, strewn haphazardly with large cushions where Dani could curl up with his Walkman and do his homework (or go through the motions). He clearly liked it when they stayed on for dinner.