Chapter 1 Apple Cake #3
She was sick of visitors, but she made an effort to say a few words to each.
She advised her younger son, Dan, to look into hair replacement therapy.
She told Melanie to try antidepressants.
Maybe they would help her lose some weight.
As for Steve and Andrea, they were neglecting music.
Neither of their boys played an instrument.
Jeanne advised Andrea to look into marching band, since the boys loved sports so much.
Or if they refused to practice, there were youth choirs.
With some ear training, they might learn to sing.
Andrea was speechless for a moment. Then she said slowly, “I realize that music is important to you.”
“My life,” Jeanne whispered.
“Would you like to see your students?” Steve asked.
Jeanne thought of her young violinists—George with his sweet tone and tendency to rush. Maisie, who forgot to count. Caleb had a good ear but didn’t work at all. Emily could not relax her tight goat-trill vibrato.
Andrea said, “Would you like some of them to come and play for you?”
“God no,” Jeanne said.
Sisters, sons, daughters-in-law were always begging to know what they could do. Jeanne gazed out the window at her sugar maple, and she told them what she wanted, since they asked.
They carried her into the garden, where she could see the trees. Tethered to her wheelchair and oxygen, she turned her face up to the fiery maples, the gold oaks, the breezy sky. How good the world smelled, the fresh damp grass.
She leaned back smiling, and her family thought she was at peace—but she was not. Quite the opposite; she was full of plans.
She told Helen she would see the rabbi. She would have a conversation with him. “Thank you,” Helen said.
When the rabbi arrived the next day, Jeanne forgot that she had asked to see him. “Who is that?” she asked Helen.
“Rabbi Lieber,” Helen said.
“It’s good to meet you, Mrs. Rubinstein.” The rabbi looked about thirteen. In his suit he seemed like a Bar Mitzvah boy.
“Jeanne wanted to have a conversation with you,” Helen said, and then, officiously, “Should I go?”
Jeanne ignored the question and told the rabbi, “You should know that I’m an atheist.”
The rabbi nodded. “Yes, I understand.”
Jeanne added, “I don’t have time for organized religion.”
“You’re in good company,” the rabbi said.
Jeanne frowned to find him so accommodating. Didn’t rabbis believe anything anymore? “But you believe in God,” she said.
“I do.”
Jeanne looked at Helen. “That’s a relief.”
“You see?” Helen told Jeanne, and she meant You see, it’s a relief—a comfort—to think of the creator.
“Belief is very personal,” the rabbi said.
“I agree,” said Jeanne. “That’s why we should keep it to ourselves.”
The rabbi smiled.
“My family would like to bury me.”
Helen broke in. “You know that’s not true.”
“They want to bury me next to my late husband,” Jeanne said. “I would like to go somewhere else.”
The rabbi asked, “Where would you like to go?”
“I’d like to be scattered,” Jeanne said.
“Cremated?” Lieber asked delicately.
“That’s not Jewish,” Helen declared.
Jeanne looked at the rabbi, who seemed reluctant to speak.
“It’s not our tradition,” he said at last.
“Good.”
“How would we visit you?” Helen demanded.
Jeanne said, “Why do you assume that I want visitors?”
Helen’s tears startled Jeanne. Not you, she thought. Melanie’s sniffling angered her, but Helen never cried. “I would visit,” Helen said.
“Oh fine,” Jeanne told the rabbi. “Go ahead and bury me. I won’t mind.”
“Thank you,” Helen whispered.
After all, Jeanne reasoned, she would never feel it. She wouldn’t even know. “Do what you want,” she told Helen and Rabbi Lieber. “Cover me with rocks.”
—
They wore her down. They came in shifts.
Jeanne closed her eyes and pretended she was sleeping.
Half-conscious, she listened to the house.
Doors closing. Water running. The crackle of crumbs flying up the vacuum cleaner.
Raised voices. Furious words. Helen brought mandelbrot from their mother Lillian’s recipe.
Sylvia countered with Lillian’s honey cake.
Jeanne tasted none of it, but she remained the cause, the crux of the matter, the still fixed point of the entire family.
How long had she been sleeping? When would she wake?
She was as surprised as anyone to find herself alive again each morning.
She opened her eyes, and everyone turned to her as to an oracle.
She did her best to keep them busy. “Take a day off,” she told Helen.
“Serve on a committee. See a friend.” She turned to Sylvia. “Bake another apple cake.”
“You’re angry at me,” Helen told Jeanne later when they were alone.
Jeanne shook her head.
“You’re angry because I have beliefs.”
“No, I don’t hold any of your beliefs against you.” Jeanne said this, but she added silently, I do think less of you. As Jeanne weakened, Helen became more prayerful, a bid, Jeanne thought, to avoid her younger sister’s fate.
“Sylvia covers her apples with brown sugar,” Helen said. “She sugars everything.”
“Of course she does,” Jeanne said. After all, people liked sweet things.
Anything sweet and easy, simple, fast. Whether in music, or in food, or life, the bitter, dark, and complicated could not compete.
This had always pained her before, but she enjoyed the injustice of it now.
She looked out the window and saw scarlet trees.
How dazzling the world was. How strange.
She heard voices at her door and saw a beautiful girl, dressed all in rags. At last, her granddaughter Phoebe had arrived with her gold hair trailing down her back. She’d come on the bus from Michigan, and she’d brought a young man, a huntsman in a rough flannel shirt.
Jeanne clasped her granddaughter’s hand, but Phoebe started back, shocked by Jeanne’s ghastly face.
Oh, you’re afraid of me, thought Jeanne. Grandmother, what big eyes you have, what withered cheeks.
“Sharp nails,” Phoebe murmured, glancing at Jeanne’s claws.
The wolf inside Jeanne whispered, The better to eat you with my dear. But Jeanne said, “Introduce me.”
Phoebe didn’t understand.
Jeanne turned to Phoebe’s deerslayer. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Chris.”
“Short for Christopher?”
“No, Christian.”
Jeanne’s laugh rattled. She had no breath, but laughter racked her body anyway. She held on to Phoebe, and she began to shake.
—
Dan and Melanie did not find Phoebe’s boyfriend funny, nor did they laugh about his name.
He was twenty-eight years old without a full-time job.
He talked about organic farming. He said he was interested in blueberries—and they said nothing.
They did not appreciate meeting him like this.
They did not appreciate meeting him at all.
Chris sat on the couch with his arms wrapped around Phoebe and withstood every hint, and every disapproving look.
He nuzzled their only child, and he ate.
Unblinking, he finished off Helen’s rock-hard pecan bars. He devoured Sylvia’s apple cake.
Now that Phoebe had arrived, Jeanne was supposed to let go, but she stayed alive to gaze at Phoebe’s lovely face. “Where’s your violin?” she asked.
Phoebe looked down at her hiking boots.
“You sold it, didn’t you?”
Phoebe began to cry.
“It doesn’t matter. In the grand scheme of things…”
Phoebe waited. Then she said, “In the grand scheme of things…what?”
Oh, who can remember, Jeanne thought. Maybe she was sleeping. It was hard to tell. She could have been dreaming or talking in her sleep. She herself didn’t know. “You played well—but other people play much better.”
“Thanks, Grandma,” Phoebe said, and suddenly Jeanne saw her as a little child, golden-haired, sitting in the sand. She could see Phoebe sand-dusted in her bathing suit. The rippling tide around her, wet sand, white foam.
“Write this down,” Jeanne told her.
When Phoebe found her notebook she had to turn nearly all the pages, because they were full of poetry. “What should I write?”
“Write down the ocean.”
Jeanne lost consciousness the next day. Dan and Steve kissed their mother’s forehead. Once more, everybody said goodbye, but another day passed, and then a third. Finally, at night when she was all alone except for Shawn, Jeanne cried out.
“Mrs. Rubinstein!” Shawn tried to make her comfortable, but she fought him.
She didn’t want help. She wanted to open her eyes, to rise from her bed.
She wanted music and she wanted apples. She wanted to touch the sandy beach, to feel summer’s heat.
She wanted all this, but she couldn’t have it. She died because she couldn’t breathe.
—
In the morning, Jeanne’s sons tried to make arrangements. They sat in the dining room and Helen said that her rabbi should lead prayers.
Sylvia turned on her. “She said no memorial service. You know she hated organized religion!”
“Stop shrieking at me,” Helen snapped.
“We are honoring Jeanne’s life, not yours.”
Dan intervened. “A simple burial.”
“No service,” added Steve.
“But she didn’t want a burial,” Sylvia reminded them.
Helen drew herself up. “She said fine.”
“Because you pressured her!”
“I would never pressure anyone,” Helen said.
“Oh really!”
“She told me fine.”
“Nobody heard her say that.”
“I heard. The rabbi heard.”
“Because the two of you were pressuring her into it.” Sylvia had beliefs as well. She belonged to a temple. She went for holidays, but she wouldn’t foist her rabbi on anybody!
“For the last time, she wasn’t pressured,” Helen exploded. “She said yes. Bury me.”
“Because she was dying! That’s why she agreed.”
Even as they argued in the dining room, the rental company came to collect Jeanne’s canisters of oxygen. Someone was on the phone about the hospital bed, now stripped bare.
“She wanted to be scattered,” Sylvia declared. “You know that,” she told Dan and Steve, who sat together near the head of the dining table. She turned to Helen. “So do you.”