I cracked the second egg on the side of the pan.
"Not three eggs," my mother said. "He won"t eat three eggs."
Uncle Vince argued. "Yes he will. He hasn"t eaten all day."
"Give him a roll," Bill said.
"Rolls are for pansies," Uncle Vito said.
"Did you drink your prune juice?" my mother asked my father. "We should get him some more prune juice."
"He"s not thirsty," Uncle Vince said.
"Something smells like it"s burning," said Uncle Vito. "Emily"s frying the little f.u.c.kers."
"I"ll make the eggs," my mother said to me, taking the pan.
"Didn"t they teach you to make eggs in college?" said Uncle Vito.
"She went to art school," Uncle Vince said.
"Oh Jesus," Uncle Vito said.
"People," I said in protest, "I know how to make eggs."
"I don"t suppose anyone cares if I go in the other room," my father said.
When the empty plate got sent back from my father"s room, more debate followed.
"How many did he eat?" Uncle Vito wanted to know.
"Three," I said.
"He left a bit of egg in the corner," Uncle Vince said. "That was probably two and a quarter eggs."
All month long we had been waiting for him to die like this. We had been waiting for him to die in the same way that we waited for the mailman. The mailman was always coming. The mailman was always coming and the dogs were supposed to bark to let us know this and all of this felt as reliable a pattern as a weather pattern that might go on forever and ever and somewhere deep down we all started to believe that maybe my father really couldn"t die. He just didn"t seem like the type.
Until one morning my father grabbed at his chest, and opened his mouth like he was choking, and we called the ambulance, which arrived quickly, despite the rush-hour traffic, despite the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit on our street. "Your father"s lung collapsed," the doctor said.
At Stamford Hospital, my father was so thin in his bed his collarbone sat across his neck like a thick metal chain. My father was nearing the end of his rope, the doctor told us, as though he was saying, your father is on a rope. Life is just a rope, and we are people with hands.
Now we had to wait. They"d patch up his lung, but he had only weeks now. Weeks. We just had to hold his hand and bring him green tea that he wouldn"t drink and shout good nutritional advice in his ears. "Antioxidants help your heart!" my mother said.
"My heart?" my father asked. "What"s that got to do with anything?"
"Oh, Victor," my mother said.
My mother sent Bill to Trader Joe"s, where he could buy a roasted chicken. To visit someone at the hospital, my mother explained in the car, you need food. You need brie and chicken and napkins and you need to act like it"s just so normal that you are there, sucking down a meal like you would at your own kitchen table. "Otherwise," my mother said, "everybody gets uncomfortable."
Mrs. Resnick showed up with Laura. My mother saw her walking down the hall and turned to me and said, "Emily, where"s Bill?"
"You sent him to get a chicken."
"That"s right," my mother said.
My father"s friends from work came, neighbors came, Adora and Nick came, and when my father asked them how in the h.e.l.l their lives were going, they both nodded. "Good, good, our lives are good." My mother and I listened on the chairs outside the room waiting for Kevin to show up. Kevin had never met my father and it was strange that the first time he did would be one of the last times he ever saw him, so for a moment, I considered not even introducing them. What was the point?
Mrs. Resnick sat next to Laura, combing Laura"s bangs over to one side.
"Mom," Laura said. Laura was twelve and embarra.s.sed of everything now. Her braces, her mother"s floral perfume, even her father a little bit, who was spitting up fluid in a dish down the hall. "Stop it."
She was shy around me now. I asked about her schoolwork, how her cla.s.smates were, did she have a boyfriend, and was he nice, was he an upstanding citizen, did he vote? And all she did was giggle and say, "I don"t know anyone who votes, I don"t think."
A woman in a wheelchair rolled by us, made scary eye contact, spewed crazy talk, asked if I thought all the demons were in h.e.l.l. At first I refused to answer, but as she persisted I told her what I really thought: yes, probably. Did I think they were sorry for being demons? I didn"t know. I hoped so.
"Of course they aren"t," my mother told the lady. "They"re demons."
My father was given a serious amount of morphine. "He won"t even realize he"s dying," the doctor said.
"Oh, he won"t like that," my mother said.
But the morphine was pumped into his veins anyway-procedure, the doctor said-and my father started having trouble seeing and organizing his thoughts. He told everybody in his hospital room that one thing was clear: his big regret was that he wanted to see his only daughter get married before he died-so sue him-no, really, why didn"t we?
"That"s sad," said Uncle Vince, looking at me. "It"s sad when you put it like that."
"If Emily is your only daughter," Uncle Vito said, "then who the f.u.c.k is she?" He pointed to Laura by the plant. Laura opened her mouth as if to speak, but she didn"t.
"Oh, why, that"s my daughter, Emily," my father said.
n.o.body spoke.
"Emily, pumpkin," my father said, looking at Laura. "Come here."
We both approached my father.
"I"ll try to die tonight," he said, not making eye contact with either of us, "so I won"t ruin your wedding day."
"All right!" The doctor interrupted in his white coat. "He really needs to sleep. He"s going to get panicky soon."
"No," my father said. "Something feels wrong."
We stared at him.
"That"s because you are panicking," the doctor said.
"Everybody is being too polite!" my father shouted. "Especially you." He looked at me. He said he didn"t understand why I worried about his neck position in the bed or if his feet were too cold. "It"s so sad. Don"t be so polite. It feels rude. Rude to be so polite about my death."
33.
Adora"s wedding dress was a Priscilla of Boston with an envelope-draped bust. She stood tall in the corner of the room, her dress wide at the bottom with an embellished beaded train flowing out into the hallway. There was a silk corset tight around her torso while the red lace crawled up her neck and ate her bare skin like a wild disease. The dress was so complicated, I couldn"t decide what would be more impressive: to get it on or off. Adora stood in front of the mirror that morning, my mother wildly tugging at the silk ropes wrapped around her torso-pulling and tugging and complaining. "I can"t breathe," Adora said.
"Of course you can"t breathe," my mother said. "You"re getting married, for Christ"s sake."
Adora"s wedding was held at the MoMa. "I want it to be as secular as it can be," Adora had said. "If somebody is to sneeze, I don"t even want to hear a "G.o.d bless you." I don"t even care if it"s an old person."
Adora didn"t wear white, and the priest was their friend Luke, who was just this guy. He conducted the ceremony, in which they were to eat herbs. Different herbs represented different emotions they were supposed to feel together, forever.
The caterer didn"t remember to bring the serving spoons, and the guests pretended not to mind that the service workers poured the Italian wedding soup directly into their bowls from the pot. We all cheered and clapped for Mr. and Mrs. Orrin Hallaby when they entered the sculpture garden and the lobby, which was full of two hundred and fifty guests, three-quarters of whom Adora didn"t even pretend to know.
They insisted on no cake (too tacky) and no first dance (so predictable). Heat was pumped into the sculpture garden so n.o.body got cold while we danced. Humans were hired to stand in the middle of the appetizer and dessert tables, with large frames around their heads. Human paintings. The tables had wheels on them, so the human paintings could move around the room and offer bacon-wrapped scallops, beef Wellington bites when they needed to. Between every course, the humans would crawl out from the tables and perform their painting. I stood by the bar, waiting for Mona Lisa to put on her show, while Kevin was dancing with my mother. Kevin was not wearing a tie because earlier that morning, he couldn"t find it in the mess of our apartment. "Just wear one of my father"s," I said.
And he said, "No, that"d be too weird."
"He"s not dead yet," I said.
"I didn"t mean it like that." He looked under the table and the bed. "How can you be an interior designer when you live like this?" he asked, picking up my clothes from the floor.
"Hairdressers don"t usually have good hair," I said back. "But they can still be good hairdressers."
"Well, that"s because they physically can"t cut their own hair. You can actually clean up the bedroom."
"Oh, stop being like this," I said. "You"re going to make me throw up."
Jonathan stood by the pond while little children threw in pennies, which were picked out by older children later when they thought no one was looking. Behind him, a statue of a naked woman, dipping her head in the water, cla.s.sical Greek beauty-"Nudity," my professor said in my college sculpture cla.s.s, walking around the naked model in the center of the room, "is being exactly what you are and, in that way, unfamiliar to everbody who knows you."
My mouth went hot, metallic, sore from something. Jonathan didn"t see me at first, and I took advantage of the luxury of being unseen. I stared at him for as long as I could without Kevin or Jonathan noticing. He was playing with a chocolate-covered pretzel in between his fingers, talking to no one. He took a sip out of his beer. There were women everywhere. Women in party dresses, women in gowns, women with bows, women with problems. Then he saw me. Another woman. He didn"t wave.
We didn"t speak, until- "It"s like a f.u.c.king Broadway show here," he said, walking over to me.
"I know," I said.
"It"s sick," he said. He stared at me. He stayed at my ear for a moment. He was a little drunk. I could tell by the way he touched my shoulder when he spoke. Kevin eyed me from across the room, doing the box-step with my mother.
"I can still feel you on my body at night," Jonathan said in my ear. "When I close my eyes."
"Don"t be a stupid creep," I said to him. And then I moved to his ear and said, "I can"t believe you had s.e.x with me when I was fifteen."
"Gandalf sayeth, "Even the wise don"t see all ends.""
"There. You appealed to a higher authority. Good job."
He twirled his finger in the foam of his beer. "I was crazy over you," he said. "You have to understand."
"I was a little girl."
"You were fine. You were always strong."
Adora approached.
"Where"s the laser show?" Adora asked us like we were supposed to know.
Adora slumped down on a yellow lotus sculpture that also served as a chair.
We couldn"t help it. All three of us bent over in laughter.
When Adora and Orrin left early at ten, she hugged me good-bye and whispered, "Emily, be careful with him. Jack"s wife, she died three years ago. He just doesn"t like to talk about it. He"s a mess. And I don"t know, with your father dying and all, if this is the right time for you to get involved with a man who"s already in so much pain."
34.
I stayed at the apartment for two days and worked from my kitchen table. Jonathan called me late at night there. His voice was raspy over the phone and this was when I hated him the most. I hated most people at this hour of the night, when n.o.body was as selfish as me, or as confused as me, and when I looked at the ceiling and at Kevin asleep next to me, and sometimes they felt like the same exact thing.
Then, the phone rang.
"Hi," I said.
"Just talk to me for a bit," Jonathan asked. "I can"t sleep."
Neither could I. So I talked to him for a bit. I left the room and Kevin turned on his side.
"Might be up for sarcasm and pivo," Jonathan whispered into the phone when I was in the kitchen.
"Sarcasm just put on her shoes."
"I wrote an imitation of Chekhov today. Why?"
"You"re becoming incredibly obscure."
"Meet me at Washington Square Park."
"Where are you? In Fairfield?"
"In my Manhattan apartment."
"Okay," I said, without even thinking about it, without even bothering to give Kevin a reasonable excuse when he woke up and asked me where I was going. I said, "Melinda just broke up with her boyfriend," and he didn"t bother to say, "But you aren"t really friends with Melinda," as I put on my coat and walked through the door; he didn"t grab me by the waist, put me down on the bed. He never demanded to know just exactly who I thought I was, and this was my excuse.