Revelation at the Food Bank

“Did you ever have sex with another woman?” I asked my husband when he was eighty-five and we had been married for sixty-two years.

I could see he was dumbstruck. I was angry about something, maybe about everything, the stupidity of everyone, the mistakes that were made every day by careless, indifferent idiots.

My husband had ordered new glasses — just ordinary glasses, a regular pair and a pair of sunglasses — and when the optician’s office called to say, “Your glasses are ready,” he drove ten miles to pick them up only to learn that only one of the two pairs was ready. Was this not ultimate stupidity? Why wouldn’t I be angry? My husband rarely gets angry, so I have to be angry for him.

Another time we went to In-N-Out and ordered two burgers, two fries, and extra ketchup. A girl handed me the bag through our car window. When we got home, we found she had given us three fries and ketchup, but no burgers. Of course, I tried to call when we got home, but you can’t call the place where you bought the food — only the corporate offices in some other state. We ate every one of the fries.

I never used to say “fuck.” But lately, I say it more frequently because our old house is so crowded with fifty years’ worth of stuff, and things keep falling down on me — books tumble out of bookcases, clothes stream out of closets, and pills crash out of medicine cabinets. Now these cabinets are also full of face masks, and latex gloves to be worn while taking in the mail.

At the start of the pandemic, my cleaning lady, who worried about us because we are so old, suggested I go to the food bank because it was safer than going grocery shopping. Why would I go to a food bank when I hadn’t lost my job, wasn’t homeless, and could pay for my groceries? She insisted that I would be less likely to catch COVID-19. I’d have no contact with people and could stay sealed in my car. She gave me directions to a church, told me they were the kindest, nicest folks, and that they gave away free turkeys every Thanksgiving. I so desired a free turkey for once in my life. After our last Thanksgiving, my husband said we should no longer buy a turkey for the holiday — it was too heavy for him to handle, too hard for him to carve now that he had a tremor, too much leftover food for just two people. Who of our children would even come to spend Thanksgiving with us? All our daughters were grown, lived far away, and not one would be interested in the little chocolate turkeys I used to buy them at See’s Candies.

I drove the two miles to the food bank at the church — really just one left turn from our street onto the road that goes from our house to the magnificent golden cross at the church’s entrance. welcome — you must wear a mask the sign read, and I joined the orderly line of supplicants winding their way through the parking lot in a colorful parade of cars. Among them I noted a BMW, a red Mercedes, and a Humvee. A pretty woman at a table greeted each car, one by one. She talked briefly to every driver, and typed something into a small computer. When I got to her, she took my name but didn’t ask me if I were poor or homeless, and placed on my windshield a little card that read one special item first visit.

“Have a great day,” she told me, “and God bless.”

When I arrived at a temporary stop sign, an older man bent toward me and kindly asked, “How many families and where do you want the food? Back seat or trunk?” I told him one family, trunk. He wrote 1-T on my windshield in white marker. I drove forward and noticed a swarm of volunteers wearing bright orange vests hurrying to the open trunk of the car ahead of me, each person carrying a carton, or a gallon jug of milk, or a bag of vegetables (some celery stalks sticking out the top), or a lumpy, foil-wrapped object, shaped, I thought, like a frozen chicken. One female volunteer was smiling as she deposited a bag into the car ahead. A young man with powerful arms was loading a large sealed box into the trunk. On its side was printed los angeles regional food bank and under it the words fighting hunger. giving hope.

My turn now. I stopped, I felt vibrations behind me as my trunk door was raised, and a series of thumps shook my car. The trunk was gently closed; the man wiped the white letters off my windshield, gave me a thumbs up, and I drove off, only to stop at one more station. A woman about my age came to my open car window and said, “How can I help you? Baby diapers? Wet wipes? Formula? Hand sanitizer? Masks? Dog food?”

“I don’t have a dog.” She looked at me closely. “Maxi pads? At my age I have to use them, maybe you can use some too.” Then she astonished me by extending her closed fist through the open window toward me, and I automatically extended mine, and we fist-bumped. “Friends!” she announced. She handed me some carefully wrapped portions of maxi pads. “See you next week, my friend,” she said. I drove home, somewhat stunned but aware that I was smiling.

________

When I opened my trunk in the garage, I felt a rare excitement — a kind of delight that a surprise awaited me, as on a special birthday. I carried a bag of potatoes into the house and asked my husband to help with the rest. The gallon of milk was too heavy for me. The carton, also. We put all the food on the kitchen table.

A beautiful chocolate layer cake, which I guessed was my special first visit item, showed an expiration date of two days ago, but I was certain it was perfect. Someone had also placed in my trunk an orchid plant in a red plastic pot. It was mostly wilted, but it still had a few floppy purple flowers hanging off a stem. How kind someone was to do this for me. Even imperfect beauty raised my spirits. In the big carton were bags of rice and beans, a box of spaghetti, cans of tuna, chicken and soup, jars of peanut butter. We unpacked the various bags and found a bottle of cooking oil, a pound of butter, apples, walnuts, carrots, onions. Other gifts I discovered included a can labeled liquid death, a bottle of dark-truffle ketchup, a six-pack of caramel-pumpkin yogurt, and a package of wild sardines in hot jalapeño sauce.

“Do we really need all this?” my husband asked.

“Do we need to eat?” I replied.

________

Whatever roused my anger toward my husband had been percolating in me for years. He was such a caring and thoughtful man, yet common annoyances surfaced. Why does he put so much cream cheese on his bagel? Or leave lights on in every room of the house? How come he tries to open the front door after our walk before he thinks to put his key in the lock?

At one trip to the food bank, I was given a five-pound bag of frozen diced ham, packaged in a long cylindrical tube. Baffled by how to store this inconvenient shape, I’d stuffed it way back in the refrigerator. That night, considering what to cook for dinner, I pulled out the tube. The sealed end split open and five pounds of freezing ham shards shot out and struck my body everywhere, ham juice soaking my pants and running down my legs into my shoes.

“Fuck,” I yelled. But wouldn’t anyone?

My husband would not. Such words do not abide in him. The anger that comes over me around mealtimes is because I have to make all the meals. We married young, when men were not house husbands, cooks, or babysitters. The man had the job. My husband was a professor, he worked many hours and graded many papers. That was the arrangement. The challenge of every meal belonged to me — three times a day, year after year. I also had a job — I wrote stories and books. But I did my work at home, where all the other work, including the care of our children, awaited me.

I must have long ago been resourceful and creative about food. I once had a professional deli-meat slicer, a bread-making machine, a blender, a toaster oven, and a pressure cooker — along with a cake mixer, waffle iron, popcorn popper, tortilla press, and everything you would need to core, peel, or shred an apple. Most of those gadgets still crowding my counters and stuffed in my kitchen cabinets have died by now — parts having failed or gone missing, their instructions booklets vanished. I still had one beloved Jewish cookbook that contained my favorite banana bread recipe, and I’d written hundreds of dates up and down that single page over the years, the days on which I baked that one perfect bread.

Since I was now stocking up at the food bank, certain foods never showed up at our dinner table. An eggplant, for example. Chicken livers, never. Lox, of course not. Cream cheese, croissants, blintzes, chocolate bars. Whenever I needed something essential, I simply — like everyone else — ordered it from Amazon. One day my husband said he’d lost his nail clipper, so I ordered six of them for $6.99 from Amazon. A big truck came the next day, with a bearded driver in it, to deliver the tiny nail clippers with a key chain attached to each one of them. Another day, a soft envelope turned up in my mailbox from Nordstrom, where I never shop. It was addressed to a woman named Linda Black at an address exactly one block to the south of my house. I could feel that whatever was in the envelope was silky and soft, perhaps a nightgown or a blouse. I could imagine it on my body. Who would ever know if I kept it? I could slit that package open and be the owner of whatever was in it.

However, when my husband saw me bringing in the mail, I told him that a package had been misdelivered. He said we should take a walk and bring it to its rightful owner. I considered telling him I’d do it myself later. He’d never know I’d kept it. Why is it I’ve never confided to him the truth about certain lowlife instincts I harbor? Does marriage require these kinds of confessions? Does he conceal such thoughts from me? I doubt he has them. But I often wonder how his truths differ from mine and how much we hide from each other.

We walked to the neighbor’s house, rang the bell. The man who lived there opened the door. We didn’t know him, though we’d lived in our house over fifty years and passed his house nearly every day on our walks. In truth, we lived in an indifferent and chilly neighborhood. Taking the package from me, he appeared to recognize, as I had, that the object inside was soft and flexible. He held up a forefinger as if he had just remembered something — and then told us that his wife had died two weeks ago. Of breast cancer. He shook his head sadly at the package. A little dog appeared at his feet; as we stood at the door, he bent to pat it gently. Then he thanked us and wished us a good day. Whatever expensive garment had arrived would never be worn, almost certainly would never be returned to the store, and, after all, could have been mine.

Some days later, as we sat outside our front door admiring the oak trees that largely concealed the slope of mountain to the north, we saw the bereaved husband walking his little dog. He waved and was, in fact, coming to see us. He held out our bank statement that had been misdelivered by the mailman to his house. We all agreed heartily that United States postal workers ought to notice that streets have different names, even if some of the house numbers are the same. Learn how to read, folks, I thought.

Now that we seemed to have made a local friend, I was distressed when, shortly thereafter, a for sale sign went up in our neighbor’s yard. On our next walk, we stopped to pay attention to the garden that he had long ago planted in front of his house — a design of shapely stones, large boulders, and colorful drought-resistant plants. Almost overnight, it seemed, one of those desert-like plants had shot forth a great, phallic stalk. Within days, it sprouted layer upon layer of smaller phallic stalks. With my cell phone, I took a picture of the odd creation. An app identified the plant as Nepenthes, which brings forth growths that look exactly like the human penis. A garden of penises — amazing. Having had only a sister, I never really saw one of them until my wedding night.

The house sold quickly, and whoever bought it proceeded to destroy the stone garden and tear out all the beautiful drought-resistant plants. I felt a pang to see those handsome phalluses cut down, but I also realized that the widower’s house had a much better view of the mountains than ours. He no doubt sold his house for a lot more money than we would ever get for ours. Thoughts like this convince me that I am unlucky, though my husband often tells me how lucky we are.

There are ever-present, recurring reasons to be distressed, to be furious. I seem to contain a switch that, once flipped, destroys whatever peace I might have briefly achieved. My husband has affectionate advice for me all the time. He takes my hand when he sees me getting agitated and begs me: “Please, just relax.” What kind of advice is that? He certainly has experience in relaxing, as it is my job to write all the complaint letters, call the banks when they make mistakes, schedule appointments with the tax man, the doctors and dentists, write the checks to the housekeeper and the gardener and pool guy and notify — when our credit card has to be updated — the twenty places that bill us every month for whatever we have to pay endlessly for.

________

At the food bank, my fist-bumping lady friend looks forward to my weekly arrival. She seems thrilled to dispense unusual nonedible materials that for some reason are donated, or have expired in some unique way. Bars of soap made out of sugar. Bamboo toothbrushes — the lightest handles with the softest bristles. A glass mug engraved with the words: enjoy the magic of christmas! One day she handed me a three-by-five index card on which she had personally written these words:

I can tell you are a worrier. Throw all your anxiety onto Him, because He cares about you. Cast your burden on the lord — He will support you! Don’t be anxious about anything; rather, bring up all your requests to God in your prayers and petitions along with giving thanks. Then the peace of god that exceeds all understanding will keep your heart and mind safe in Christ Jesus.

Of course, I thanked her. Clearly the people at this church want me to enjoy life. They give me gifts, they welcome me, they wear masks to protect me from the pandemic, they invite me back, they bless me and bless me. Who else does this? Who else wants me to have happiness? I’m a Jewish girl, but I’ve never known the rewards of religion. Is it too late?

________

Unquestionably, my age presents challenges, though the internet tells me I have a good chance of living to ninety. But the road ahead is filled with so many medical tests. My doctor, who doesn’t actually see her patients now but instead communicates only by video-call or email, ordered a series of blood tests for me. Since my breast cancer surgery ten years ago, she requires me to have a CEA test, which tracks a particular cancer marker. She called to inform me that my recent test’s results were concerning; my antigens were elevated. She duly ordered another and, after I had my blood drawn at the lab (both the tech and I wearing our masks), she called to inform me they’d risen further. Duty bound, she then referred me to an oncologist, who, without ever seeing me clinically, ordered yet another test, a CT/PET scan.

________

Though the date for this scan was set, the day for a previously ordered test, my colonoscopy, was also approaching. Before I could have the colonoscopy, I was required to take a COVID-19 test. To do this, I had to pay a visit to the clinic, whose drive-through line wrapped several times around the parking lot.

While slowly inching forward, I sneezed. When I leaned sideways to grab the handkerchief on the passenger seat, my foot briefly slipped off the brake and I hit the car in front of me. The impact was very soft, but it was a bump. The woman ahead leapt out of her car and strode furiously toward me. She was baring her teeth. I turned off my ignition and got out of my car. I checked her bumper. Not a scratch. The line ahead was now moving forward, the cars behind us began to honk.

“You crazy bitch, you fucking bitch!” She stood close to me, wearing a nurse’s badge. “You hit me! I’ll sue you!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But there’s no damage.”

“The whole fucking world is damaged,” she yelled.

She hmphed away, shaking her fist. I returned to my car, started the engine. Moved forward. Stopped. Another nurse at a table stuck a long Q-tip up each of my nostrils, and jabbed another one into the back of my throat.

COVID-negative, my reward was to drink the ten gallons of lemon-flavored liquid in preparation for my colonoscopy. In the pre-op room, I could hardly wait for the anesthetist’s infusion of propofol. I remembered the same moment before previous procedures — for my gallbladder surgery, for my hysterectomy, for my breast cancer surgery, for my knee replacement. Why not just get put out for good and be done with it all! With the tests to come and the waiting for results and the fear, followed by even more tests! We all will fail the ultimate test, so why keep going? Can’t an old woman get some propofol for at-home, domestic use?

________

For the CT/PET scan, I would be injected with a radioactive material and have to wait an hour for it to circulate through my body. My husband drove me to the imaging complex that did MRIs, CTs, ultrasounds, digital mammography, nuclear medicine, fluoroscopy, and guided biopsies. As he drove, I took a picture of his profile. I always have my camera ready in case something amazing passes us by, but my husband is often the only subject available. I’ve acquired hundreds of these photos of him driving us to supermarkets and medical appointments, but also through the Tuscan hills outside Florence where he once taught for a term, and through the moors in England when we spent his sabbatical in Oxford, and on Highway 101 through California where the ocean breeze ruffled our hair through the car’s sunroof. His handsome profile had changed considerably since the last time I took pictures of him driving — his cheeks now were visibly sunken, his hair had thinned, his beard’s stubble was completely white. His beautifully shaped lips seemed narrowed into a tight line. What was happening to him? And though I meant to take only photos of the subject in front of my camera lens, I sometimes accidentally took a selfie and realized that whatever was happening to my husband was also happening to me.

The CT tech, a middle-aged man who introduced himself as Jimmy, called me into his office. He asked me to leave all my belongings with my husband and told me to follow him down the hall. “I’d like to take my phone,” I told him, “so I can read if I have to wait an hour.”

“Take nothing with you. You are going to just have to relax while you wait.”

Relax again? While waiting for radioactive material to light up places in my body where cancer might be growing? My husband threw me a pitying glance and took out his copy of the New Yorker.

Just as I was about to recline on a soft chair, Jimmy came in and whispered: “Don’t worry about getting through this hour. In a few minutes I’ll be back, and I’ll tell you my life story.”

I wondered how to pass the time. I tried to meditate, which lately I had been practicing with a Zoom class. The key to successful meditation was to choose an anchor, ideally your own breath going in and out, and hang onto the anchor no matter how wildly your thoughts might flit about. In meditation, we were encouraged to accept ourselves in whatever state we were in at the present moment. To be at peace without criticizing ourselves was the way to enter a transformative process. I was just getting into the rhythm of it — my breath going out like a little death and then coming in as a blessing, over and over again — when Jimmy returned and said, “Now I can tell you how I got this job, how I always wanted to be a jet pilot, how I came to this country from Lebanon and found the most beautiful woman in the world to marry.” I pretended to listen while still focusing on my breath. Finally, I begged to know if the radioactive stuff was now sufficiently distributed through my body and could we please have the scan?

Jimmy ushered me into the room which he said had to be kept very cold since the multimillion-dollar scanner was temperamental and easily overheated. It looked like a cylindrical refrigerator laid on its side, into which I had to be strapped. Jimmy’s narration of his life story had ended happily with a double wedding at which both he and his brother married the two most beautiful women who were, like the brothers, also from Lebanon. He told me to hold still, he was about to start the scan. He turned out the light in the room and closed the door. A motor turned on and I could feel something whizzing above my head. I lost the anchor of my breath at once, since meditating in a dark freezing tube was like meditating in a coffin. I hated being in this situation but I tried to accept myself and appreciate my hatred.

________

Fury sits in a pouch inside you somewhere and shoots out suddenly when you least expect it. It’s a crack on the skull with a hatchet. It can strike while you’re putting on your socks, or as you catch a glimpse of cable news. Fury seems a reasonable reaction to the delivery of a big cardboard box from Walmart with only a single jar of jelly in it, but the wrong flavor. To a mistaken letter from the IRS informing me that I owe the government four-thousand dollars. To a robocall that insists I’ve been charged by Amazon for a new iPhone and I need to press 1 to cancel the charges. To news that my truck warranty has expired and I need to renew it. To a scam call from a guy pretending to be my grandson: “Hello Grandma, you may not recognize my voice since I have a cold, but I’ve been in a car accident and I need your help.”

Old traumas also rise up, painful enough to bring tears to my eyes — my husband’s mother, who hated my guts because she thought I was too thin and not rich enough for her son. Who, with her husband, tried to throw me down the stairs when we told them we were engaged. Who, when I finally married my husband looked at my delicate, gold wedding band and said, “Such a skinny ring! What’s the matter, are you ashamed of being married?”

Fury at the bastard who reviewed my first novel, published when I was in my twenties, that told the story of my father’s tortured death by leukemia at the age of fifty-five. I got the exciting news from my publisher that TIME magazine was to review my book. The magazine sent a photographer to my home to take pictures of me sitting at my typewriter, holding my baby daughter in my arms, and standing beside my handsome husband. For once I felt lucky. A review in TIME could make my name. The photographer stayed all day. He asked me to change my clothes three times; he asked me to pose in the backyard sitting on the swing and holding a flower; he asked if I could make him a tuna-fish sandwich.

When, a week later, I read the review, I nearly fell to my knees:

Abram Goldman is a robust and endearing antique dealer with an imaginative zest for life. When he begins to suffer from leukemia, he is treated with the inevitable escalation of drugs, yet his condition deteriorates. His Jewish-mother-type wife and his daughters — one, the narrator, married with two daughters; the other, the novel’s problem child, unmarried and with one foot in the Beat scene — observe his gallant but losing battle.

Such a tale is, of course, depressing. But Author Merrill Joan Gerber makes it even more so by coating it with sentimentality. A short-story writer who has published in Redbook and Mademoiselle, she seems glued to the traditional women’s magazine faith — the world is blackest just before a rose-tinted dawn. After Abram’s death, the problem sister marries her beatnik lover. The other sister decides that she will bear a son with her father’s name —“It was all I could do in this world — all I could hope to do.” Almost any death has a quantum of emotion, but because Author Gerber writes from a self-pitying, self-absorbed point of view, she grabs most of it for herself.

Fury! “Jewish-mother-type wife?” The man misunderstood every word in my book. A moron! A woman hater! An asshole! And TIME magazine printed not one single picture.

________

My old age has brought on anger. Let’s look at it full in the face, the face that now has become a wreckage of my former smooth cheeks, lovely lips, delicate neck, blue eyes, flawless earlobes, chestnut-colored hair. And below, my once-gracefully shaped body, with a dancer’s arms and legs, adorable breasts, firm bottom — what’s become of it now? An elephant in a nightgown! And inside? The uterus gone, a breast disfigured, a knee missing, a bladder that leaks, a heart that bursts into tachycardia without warning, and my God, the horrifying whiskers on my chin.

What is this punishment for? Punishment is for being bad, of course. My grandmother told me to be a good girl all the time because God would know when I was bad and would punish me. When I was five and in kindergarten, I was instructed by my teacher to go up the stairs to the principal’s office at P.S. 238 in Brooklyn — the place where only bad children were sent. I went up those stairs shaking with terror I could feel in every cell of my body. When I entered the principal’s office, he handed me a snapshot of myself in the schoolyard wearing a little hankie pinned to my coat as I stood with two other children playing a game and said, “Hello dear little girl, the school photographer took this photo, and here is a copy for you and your family.”

________

There’s a picture of my husband and me taken in Miami Beach outside our high school’s theater at an evening concert where my husband was an usher. As a volunteer, he got to attend concerts for free, and on this night, our first real date, he planned to let me in a side door so we could both watch a famous pianist perform. He was wearing the required white jacket and looked so astonishingly handsome that when I saw him, I felt an actual weakness in my knees. I was newly sixteen, I was thin, with curly brown hair, and I wore a gold four-leaf clover necklace (a gift from my father) in the square-cut neckline of my dress.

Studying that picture in later years, I think my husband looks a bit like Elvis Presley or Tony Curtis, but on that night, he was just my gorgeous new boyfriend. As I sat beside him in the dark row of the concert hall, he slowly slid his arm along the back of my chair and touched my shoulder with his fingers. I gasped.

After the concert, but a half hour before my father was to pick me up in front of the theater, my boyfriend and I walked down to the beach and sat in the moonlight by the ocean. He reached for something on my neckline (I thought my four-leaf clover), and he said “Mine?”

Thinking he meant the necklace, I said, “No!” But what he was really saying was “Mind?”— did I mind him touching me there, where my small breasts were blooming? My saying no gave him permission to touch them gently, first one, then the other. I knew then that he must touch them forever.

________

My husband and I keep visiting retirement communities. My God, I don’t want to live in two rooms, my husband in the next room with his piano, or in the room with me. I don’t want to attend lectures, exercise classes, or learn origami. I don’t want to eat every meal surrounded by other old folks. Although it’s true I am so very tired of cooking all our meals, I can’t see that paying ten thousand dollars a month to be rescued from that chore is worth the cost.

When my husband and I visit these various retirement communities, we briefly forget that at home we have a ten-room house filled from one end to the other with the essential objects from our fifty-odd years of living there. We sometimes talk about the practical benefits of moving into one of these expensive retirement units, packing only a few articles of clothing, a couple of books, even a bathing suit (all these places have pools), and moving into a totally neat room or two, with the promise of having whatever color of paint on our walls that we choose, and having them install any color carpet that we want.

The concept is deliberately, intentionally inviting — just us, a few necessary things, and excellent meals prepared for us every day. A new, inviting social world, maid service, entertainment, instruction, a personal gym, a beauty shop, as well as promises of emotional tranquility, safety and protection, transportation to medical care if necessary, and a subtext that it’s likely we will be so much healthier in this supportive, welcoming community, that we’ll never be sick.

Sometimes I imagine that our entire house has vaporized — not a thing left, as happens when a plane crashes into a home. Not a single photo album remaining, not an obsolete pile of computers, no tax records, medical bills, vinyl records, videotapes, cassette tapes, reel-to-reel movies, CDs, or eight tracks. Gone would be our stacks of the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Sewanee Review, the Atlantic Monthly.

Lost sock drawers would be dispatched, never to be sorted through again. Closets of extension cords, hammers and pliers, miscellaneous bulbs, plugs, rolls of duct tape — vanished! Let me out of here with just the clothes on my back. Immigrants have faced such a bleak landscape for centuries. Our grandparents did it, why not us? With our bare bones, why not venture into a new life?

But once we get home after such a visit, once we enter our cluttered, familiar, messy place, we begin to cherish our space, in which we can wander, fortunate as we are: My husband to his music room, where his grand piano sits and his pile of precious volumes of Bach’s music, me to my sewing room (where I have not sewed in forty years), where my mother’s sewing box sits with its red tomato pincushion, its container of unique buttons, its seam-ripper, and her silver thimble pocked with tiny dots. Even her black wooden darning egg with which she showed me how to darn the holes in my father’s socks is in there. A skill to remember, she told me.

Our house: container of all memories, events, emergencies, place of all meals, of our thousands of nights of falling asleep together in our bed, of telling our daughters their bedtime stories, of standing, grateful, under the showerhead to be washed clean of the day’s stains, real and imagined.

What? Move to a retirement place where the old who preceded you in that clean, repainted apartment are dead? Might have actually died in there?

The real terror is this. Which of us will die first? (It stands to reason he will.) Which of us will be able to survive in this house all alone? Who will open the jar of blueberry jam? (Me needing him.) Who, when the pipe bursts under the sink, will have the presence of mind to go outside and find that green wheel and turn off the water? (Him needing me.)

But I also know that we are isolated, losing interest in all things, even each other, and that we almost never see another human being in a social context. We are not joiners. We are Jews without a Jewish community. We don’t believe in God, or heaven, or an afterlife, or even in having funerals. Who are these people who have two hundred guests at their funerals? They seem to be rich guys who traveled the world, flew their own planes, invented the zipper, gave their wives diamonds, and have brilliant, successful children. And who are we? No one.

Not really no one. We, too, have lived long, interesting lives, we have had children (but where are they?), and we did a few important things: like work, and teach, and write a book, and be nice to some people, and help a few to achieve some goal or other, but still, who would come to the funeral of either of us? Why would we want anyone to come?

My husband’s parents’ ashes are in the back of a closet at his sister’s house. She keeps intending to scatter them somewhere, sometime, and though she could now add her husband’s ashes to the mix as well, she still never gets around to it. Her husband shot himself in the head in their backyard when he realized he was becoming helpless. He knew how to use a gun; he’d been in the Korean War. He told his wife what he was planning. She knew it. She knew what he was going to do the day he went out into the backyard in his bathrobe with his gun. He was suffering three fatal diseases at once, and he was aware he was a few days short of total dependence on others. She waited for the sound of the gunshot. And she waited. Then she heard him calling her name. Oh, she knew he might not do it, and that would mean total servitude to him for the rest of her life. She was terrified he would do it and also feared he might not. And when he called her name, she went to the garden door to ask him what he wanted. He said, “I can’t find the bullets.” She said, “Look in your bathrobe pocket.” He looked and said, “Oh yes, thank you.” And then she went inside, and she heard the gunshot. The police checked her hands for gunpowder just in case.

My husband and I don’t want funerals, though he once said he wished his parents had graves somewhere that he could visit if he wanted to. Since their graves are still in his sister’s closet, he decided we should buy funeral plots even if we don’t want funerals. In fact, we already own four graves for the two of us. We bought two expensive plots in the Jewish cemetery in Hollywood Hills when my mother died and was buried beside my father, and then we bought two more cheap plots in the little graveyard — the Pioneer Cemetery in our small town, established in 1881 — a block down the road from our house. It spans two acres and features magnificent oak trees. We walk through that cemetery very often. We breathe the same air in our house that gently blows over the graves in that cemetery. The oak trees are so tall that they nearly block our view of the mountains that rise just to the north. We appreciate our little cemetery because it has no gift and flower shop, no piped music, no rules about embalming or having a cement enclosure for each coffin. It has no worker collecting little printed cards signed by funeral guests as they exit a fancy chapel in time to see a coffin containing a body being slid into a shiny black hearse for the trip to the gravesite.

In fact, our cemetery overlooks a park where little kids ride on swings, and where families picnic, and where dog lovers play with their dogs. It hardly reeks of death at all. At Christmas we see poinsettias decorating the graves, and on the Fourth of July, the city parade passes right by the buried dead, music blasting from big speakers as the owners of old Fords and Pontiacs wave to the people lining the street, the Search and Rescue team marches by with their sweet, slavering dogs, and the fire trucks shoot darts of water at the onlookers on what is usually a very hot day. For a cemetery, it’s really a cheerful place. Sometimes, when there’s a burial, the sounds of bagpipes come floating down the street toward our house. It’s a pleasant place, and seems it would be homelike for us to be buried there.

________

Sometimes I wonder if, in our old age and loneliness, we decide to join a synagogue, and we get to have a rabbi. Will we have to then be buried in the Jewish cemetery alongside my parents? Will someone have to say the kaddish for the dead over our graves? Should we learn the words of the kaddish ourselves so that one of us can say kaddish for the other? I looked up the translation of the kaddish prayer itself. How could it be that it never mentions dying?

Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will.

May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.

May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.

Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

The kaddish for the dead is asking quite a bit. Should we be required to bless and praise, glorify and exalt, extol and honor the Holy One, especially since the Holy One has just allowed our beloved person to die?

________

What if one of us falls? I’ve had one very serious fall. It happened on a day I was planning to go to my therapy group at the medical clinic. Our therapist had confessed to me a love of lemons. She was in her late fifties, about the age of my oldest daughter, unmarried, good-looking, with dyed red hair that fell in a strange pointy cut on either side of her face. We had a lemon tree in our backyard, and I decided to bring her several lemons. She counseled five depressed patients, including me, who met with her each week. Every one of us was dealing with some form of mental illness: PTSD, bipolar disorder, an eating disorder, a panic disorder, suicidal thoughts. I personally had considered drowning myself in our pool for no clear reason that I could recall. My husband thought my depression might be due to my car accident, which occurred on a day I was on my way to the Cancer Support Center for my painting class. By that time, my chemo was over, my radiation completed, and a fairly large part of my left breast had been removed. During my recovery, I continued to drive to the support center for a healing art class.

The art teacher showed us wonderful ways to paint palm fronds, but I painted only images from my family photo album — my grandmother as a girl after arriving in America from Poland, wearing a black lace dress pulled tight at her waist. My mother in her eighth-grade graduation dress in a photographer’s studio in Brooklyn, a diploma in her hands, and on her breast a small, gold pin inscribed with her name and the words academic excellence award. My beloved, died-too-soon father, wheeling me in a carriage on the Coney Island boardwalk, he smoking his pipe, and I teething on another of his pipes’ stems — an actual white wooden pipe of his in my tiny mouth. My mother and father with me at the Bronx Zoo, the three of us in front of a cage of wild animals, while in my gloved hand I hold a box of Cracker Jacks.

Driving to my painting class one day, my car was suddenly hit from behind by a truck and sent spinning around to face oncoming traffic. I felt myself sailing through the air, I spun around to see trucks speeding toward me, and then one of them smashed into my car, then another. I felt the windshield glass crumble into my lap.

I was transported from the car to an ambulance and then to a hospital. I was injured but not badly. But the accident unmoored me. I had just survived cancer and then — when the truck smashed into me — I found myself having to face death again.

I began to think I had lived long enough. I wandered the edge of our pool, wondering how long it would take to drown. I counted all my pills saved over the years from my many surgeries — phenobarbitals, Vicodins, Valiums, tramadols, Norcos, Ativans. When my husband saw me reading my old copy of Final Exit, published by the Hemlock Society, he convinced me to see a psychiatrist. She encouraged me to join my therapy group, which was the reason that on the day of my fall I was going into my backyard to pick lemons from our tree to give to my therapist.

A lovely, large lemon on the back side of the tree caught my attention. I pulled on the fruit, but it would not release into my hand. I pulled even harder. The branch of the tree shook, but the lemon held on. I used all my strength. The lemon snapped free, sending me backward so fast that I fell over a brick planter and landed on my back in the dirt, smashing my head against the wall of the house behind it.

My husband, hearing me yell, came out and at first could not find me, invisible as I was behind the tree and hidden in the weeds of the planter. He tried to pick me up but he could not; only his fingers remained strong from so many years of playing the piano.

I told him to call our nephew, a very tall young man. Though I had to lie there in the planter for another hour, my nephew arrived, all six-foot-four of him, and lifted me up in the blink of an eye. I did not get to my therapy group that day with a lemon for my therapist because I had broken a vertebra. Man proposes, God disposes.

________

My friend at the food bank began to worry about my health when I told her I had to have a biopsy of my thyroid. The scan results had announced the following:

Conclusion: Hypodense right thyroid lobe suspicious for hypermetabolic neoplastic pathology and thyroid carcinoma. There is intense tracer activity in the region of the urinary bladder.

When I emailed my oncologist, she sent me a happy-face emoji. All that tracer activity in the urinary bladder was simply the radioactive material being peed away. As for the thyroid — well, yes, tracer activity there might mean cancer. She advised another biopsy in three months. If it was cancer, we’d deal with it. Forget it for now.

Forget it?

________

I wish my husband would remember to take out the garbage. To change a light bulb. To put a new water filter in the ice maker. To clean up the bear poop.

One morning we found the garbage can knocked over and the remains of a week’s worth of trash littering the front yard. Bears have been coming down from the mountains where there’s been no rain and food is scarce. Neighbors’ security cameras catch them climbing into their pools and up their avocado trees. On the day our trash was strewn everywhere, I noticed what looked like an enormous turd on our lawn. I studied this huge, segmented thing and wondered if I should take a photo of it with my cell phone, maybe examine it through the lens app to confirm it was actually produced by a bear. When I told my husband I wanted to take a photo of it, he looked at me with his eyebrows raised. I knew he disapproved of the idea. It was unseemly to him. I was always willing to cross lines he would not venture past.

I indicated to my husband that we had to get rid of it; or, more specifically, he had to get rid of it. He agreed. I thought it should be done right away. A week later, the thing was still on the lawn. When my husband and I went out to take our walk, I pulled a long twig from a tree and knocked the pieces of shit, over and over, until I got them all the way to the curb, where on Monday the street cleaning truck would swoop them up with a big brush and take them away. But when I saw my husband watching me, when I saw the puzzlement and dismay on his face, I wondered if our marriage was finally coming to an end.

________

My husband has allowed me to cut his hair every month for the last fifty years. This shows some trust, I think. I learned how to cut hair when I was five, in my aunt’s little beauty shop, which was in a bedroom in our Brooklyn house, where she served the neighborhood ladies. My aunt dedicated herself to the wartime efforts in Brooklyn; she sold war bonds, rolled bandages for the soldiers, marched with the Red Cross women in parades on Avenue P, all of them dressed in white, like angels. From her customers she collected little trinkets — beads, pearls, costume jewelry — which would be distributed to pilots in case their planes crashed on a mountaintop in New Guinea and it was necessary to trade with natives for food. My aunt and her customers talked incessantly about their husbands or sons who were off fighting, the food rationing, the latest news from various fronts, all the while my aunt’s scissors dancing around the heads of these worried women. As a child, I listened to their stories, I bent fallen hairpins into the shapes of animals, and I learned enough to cut my own hair and the hair of my future husband ever after.

Now, once a month, I roll a kitchen chair into our little bathroom, and my husband removes most of his clothes and sits before me while I cut his hair with a pair of antique scissors rescued from my aunt’s beauty shop. I proceed from the tender back of his neck to the edges of his ears, to the top of his head (now with barely a hair upon it), and finally to the front of his face where I trim his eyebrows, carefully, with a much smaller pair of scissors. With a little electric clipper, I shape his sideburns. Sometimes, when I am this close to him, he leans forward and kisses me wherever his lips land. Sometimes he lifts my shirt and he kisses my breast. I kiss the top of his head and hold it against me. We are so lucky to be together, alive, and at this old age, still taking care of one another. I want us to live together forever. Or even better, maybe die at the same time.

________

I am struck with an idea for a new business. I will finally become an entrepreneur. I will call my company The End of the Road, and it will be a service for newly bereaved widows or widowers who want to skip the horrors of being the one left behind with all the crap to take care of, with all the financial details to sort out, the one who has to call the mortuary, order the coffin, throw out her husband’s old shoes and give away his shirts and hats, the one who has to call tax lawyers, realtors, trust fund managers. My new business will simply be a kind of gentle transition — not the kind that hands off the grieving mate to a retirement community and arranges for the furniture to be laid out in her new one-room life but will provide a much-needed service for painless self-deliverance, the kind of end a sick, well-cared-for dog enjoys. My company will provide fast and guaranteed death while at the same time contracting to take charge of all the requirements of ordering the death certificates, remodeling the run-down house, and selling it for a big profit, assuring that all its contents will be sold to the highest bidder and that one’s heirs will get their rightful shares.

My new business will allow those who sign up to skip all the end-of-life horrors. Even better, my “premium” level of service could be chosen by both mates at the same time. On a selected date, together they’d check into a spa-like, cozy place, together, with Baroque music playing, they’d clasp hands as a stream of propofol would be sweetly, painlessly administered to each, followed by a boost of fentanyl — and poof, all things unpleasant would vanish, especially the horror of protracted dying. Nothing left, nothing to it, just sweet nothings now and forever.

________

My kind friend at the food bank has new gifts to press upon me. A bag of modern, brightly colored, silicon soup ladles, with price labels attached: $18.95. Each! “What am I supposed to do with so many?” I asked her. “Be a good neighbor,” she suggested. She handed through my window a supersize container of laundry detergent. “Listen to this,” she said, and read to me from the label: “The uplifting scent of orange essential oil blended with essence of grapefruit and notes of lemon and exotic citrus bursting with sunshine will brighten your mood. Smile and take on the day with your refreshingly clean laundry. So concentrated only an eighth of a cup will do a large load of clothes!”

“It almost makes me want to do the laundry,” I laughed. As I was about to drive away, she said, “Wait! One more gift!” and put into my hand a small, leather-bound book titled And He Walks With Me: 365 Daily Reminders of Jesus’s Love.

“I want you to keep this,” she said. “I’ve underlined the most important parts on every page. Read a page every day. If you’re sad, my friend, or scared, just remember, those who know Jesus as their friend are never alone. You will always have a friend in Jesus. And a friend in me.” “But what if you need it?” I asked her. “Don’t worry. I have the whole Bible!” she assured me, and we fist-bumped one more time.

________

I keep my laundry in my pink and yellow seersucker laundry bag from college, on a hook in my sewing room; my husband keeps his in his Air Force duffel bag that hangs on a hook in his closet.

When I was aware that we probably both had no clean clothes left to wear, I normally would ask him to bring his laundry bag into the laundry room (where I assumed he would put his clothes into the washer). Though he seemed to hear me ask this, he also seemed to forget my request immediately. In the most recent enactment, I began asking him on Sunday to bring in his laundry. I usually make my request while we are eating a meal together, the time when we’re most likely to exchange information. I asked him again on Tuesday if he would bring in the laundry so I could do a wash. He agreed. He didn’t do it. I wondered if I would need to lead him by the hand to the hook in his closet. What was it about this simple request that made it so hard for him to process? Of course, I could easily have done it myself, delivered both his laundry and mine into the washing machine, but I didn’t. I thought he should bring in his own dirty laundry. By Friday, I asked him, with some impatience, if he would now, this minute, bring in the laundry, that I was totally out of clean clothes and had to do a wash. “I’ve asked you several times,” I reminded him, “so do it right now, will you?” “I will,” he nodded, and then I watched him walk down the hall to practice the piano.

There are limits, even in a marriage of sixty-two years, that can be breached. How many times do Bach’s French Suites need to be played, no matter how beautifully and artistically and precisely, when a family’s underwear needs to be washed, dried, and folded? How much patience toward a partner, how much kindness and understanding of his needs, tolerance of his basic nature, acceptance of his human faults, even in view of one’s adoration of his solid psyche, marvelous strong chin line, masculine handsomeness, sexual prowess — how much can a wife tolerate, finally? Not enough, apparently. Which brought me, at last, to throw at him the question growing ever more insistently in my bosom since I first met him one day before my sixteenth birthday. The question, shaped like a snake, came shooting out of my mouth when he came into the kitchen to take his heart and blood-pressure pills. “I have to know something. I’ve thought about this from the day I met you. Did you ever have sex with another woman? Did you do sexual things with some girl before me?”

He blanched. I never knew what that was until I saw it happen. Holding onto his pill bottle, he said, “Why are you asking me this now?”

“Because if I should have cancer again, I want to know the answer before I die. When you married me, I was pure as the fallen snow. I never, never, never —”

“Of course,” he said. “I know that.” He made a move toward me, as though he might pat me reassuringly, even tenderly, on my shoulder, but I jumped back.

“I wasn’t even sixteen but you . . . you were eighteen! Older. More experienced. Please tell me! Did you have sex with some girl before me?”

I watched his eyes, the tilt of his head, as he thought about his reply. He appeared to think I had gone crazy. I understood his hesitancy: many men of eighty-five — even of fifty-five or thirty-five — have had multiple, maybe dozens, maybe hundreds of women, girlfriends, lovers, wives, and here I wanted a total confession, one that might un-man him and his right to his own secrets, his own private knowledge of his intimate history. He had a right to his secrets, didn’t he? At that moment I didn’t think so. From this man, to whom I had given myself in utter innocence, I wanted a pledge of his total loyalty and purity as well. We never would have gotten to this moment if only he had brought in the fucking laundry.

The look of anguish on his face revealed his unspoken reaction: that’s enough. I can’t do this. I can’t listen any longer. As he turned to walk away, I knew I’d lost my final opportunity.

“From now on do your own laundry!” I cried out, helplessly, in tears. “I won’t ever ask you again.” I heard for one instant the pure madness in my voice.

“Oh, please, please,” he pled, even as he turned to walk away from me, as he shuffled down the hall, as he struggled to get to his music room. “Please, can’t you just relax,” he said, talking to me over his shoulder while escaping from me. “You have been the love of my life. You have been my sweetheart forever.” His head was shaking with the tremor from which he suffered so badly. “Please don’t do this to us now,” he said, “when there is so little time left for us to be happy.”