I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (40 page)

Not so different from moving our friends and family to Italy or to Spain or to Hollywood. Joining or creating new family and hanging on to the old. Look at the Actors Studio, grown out of the Group Theatre. I’ve felt lucky always, but not been able to put my finger on why. Now I know.

W
hen it comes to end-of-life experiences, or serious, debilitating illness, or plain old facing the end, or death, if you must, I am the queen of denial.

The ashes of my mother-in-law Rachel, who was such a strong friend and who was with Fremo when Fremo died, are on the shelf above the TV she watched all the time, in the sunroom. Next to her are the ashes of Dude, our last dog.

Belinda and Phyllis went to the hospice on Rachel’s last day to kiss her and say good-bye. Phyllis said, “Go, Ma, we’re all right.” Rachel went before the door closed. She had told her children, Joey, Phyllis, and younger son Ralph, that she wanted her ashes spread on 6th and Lincoln, the street in front of her home, where she had raised her children.

Lincoln Street is a heavily trafficked street. We’d feel as if we were throwing Rachel under the wheels of a speeding car. So we Scotch-taped a picture of Rachel on the gold-colored can containing her ashes and put it high on the shelf over the flat-screen TV. It feels comfortable.

•   •   •

W
hen my father died, his ashes were given to me by the people who burned him up, set his body on fire. He had raised the issue—“Take my ashes to Israel”—when he briefly visited us here in New York.

“And if I don’t go to Israel?”

“Pour my ashes over your mother’s grave.”

I took a cab to Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, New York—it was a cold autumn day. I was led to and left at my mothers’ family gravesite. There they were. Grandma, Mother, Fremo.

Big, tall, gray stone markers loomed over them, close together in the crowded cemetery. I tried to make it real that these crucial women in my life were under there. Bones, yes. I give you the bones crumbling in boxes. But the spirits of my women were not in the cold Mount Hebron earth. I placed the respectful stones on top of the markers. To say
I was here. I visited you.
The endless whoosh and dust of the traffic on the highway was distracting. Tires, brakes, engines. This was not a quiet resting place. I carried the vessel of my father’s ashes. The remains of Abraham Rosenthal. Dad. The wind whipped. I looked at the highway. I couldn’t allow bits of my dad to be carried by the wind to the endless, zooming, anonymous, loud cars, under the wheels, ground into the road. No.

The grass in front of my mother’s gravestone had all but gone. The soil was hard blackish-brown. I tried to dig with my hands, then with a brush handle from my bag. I asked a cemetery man for a spade, but though I tried and tried, I couldn’t bury the vessel deep enough to be absolutely safe. The soil was unyielding, frozen. I had told the cemetery man it was a plant I was putting there. I didn’t know if the whole vessel was allowed. It was Mount Hebron; the last thing I wanted was
a confrontation with cemetery Jews and their rules. This was a mean, cold corner for my family to come to rest in. Their choice of burial, not mine. What would mine have been?
You’re not going to die. Don’t even think about it!

How could I watch them die, when they depended on me, with my magical power, to save them? How could I let them down, when they would have given their lives for me? Their crazy, quixotic, amazing, beautiful, beautiful lives. For me.

I am so filled with longing and regret, my throat closes, constricted, eyes wet as I write, everything a blur. I want them back, laughing around the dining room table, whispering in the living room.

I do spend time thinking about the best, most palatable place for my ashes to rest, or be sprinkled, or hidden (Central Park, mixed with Joey’s, on Dinah’s property, not mixed with water, etc.).

•   •   •

T
he work is gone now. In this overly competitive world, everyone’s next-door neighbor is making documentaries, or documenting themselves online. And the truth is, I’m relieved. Now “We Are the World” has opened up the consciousness of the musical and theatrical communities. There are good activists everywhere, and the issues in these years are too horrendous to contemplate. I’m not opening that door.

And so our family lives each juicy day, by day, by day. Phyllis, my sister-in-law, has been a minor character in these pages, but she’s a major character in my life. She is a constant, by my side in the house and in the emergency room. Her Italian name is Philomena Rose Fioretti, my grandchildren call her Zia, Italian for “aunt,” and she is the heart of our house. Quirky like Fremo, passionate like her twin brother, Joey. Strong and fragile, too. We both wanted a sister and have each other, working through our heightened nerves and tempers over
the years together. She shops every day in the markets and makes beautiful food every night. Drowning out fear with food and friends.

In these last two years, Joey, now seventy-four, wakes up and takes my hand. He doesn’t want to lose me. I worry about his hip. We both run from the inevitable. We’re so, well, alive, we’re so young, we are both so young, and Joey, since he was a boy, practically when we met, has always had a mythical view of my talents, not unlike my mother. The more we run, the more puzzling and mystifying the reality. How can we die?

•   •   •

I
miss my friends. I have a shelf on my bookcase where I keep pictures of all my dead friends. Gladys and Waldo in a frame together on top, that she drew on in pen, with their faces growing like flowers. Bob Altman, Spalding Gray, Bruce Paltrow, Larry Hauben, Nick Dante. Pictures of my living family and living friends surround them. I won’t let them die.

A year and a half ago I adopted two black kittens. I named them Fremo and Gladys. They were born in a cellar, permanently spooked by everything. But I get to say their names all day.

A
nd here I am on the Upper West Side again, living in an apartment as beautiful as a Russian Easter egg, surrounded by the things my mother bought at auction when I was growing up on the Drive, with Fremo’s painting on one wall, the markets and shops on Broadway beckoning, and especially the people, the parade I join daily, melting into the stream. A sea of baby strollers and old people with walkers and electric wheelchairs and schoolchildren, protected as I never needed to be, the beautiful men and women, white, Asian, black, with their strong gym bodies, creating a parade of life as I walk down to Zabar’s and back. I look down the wide streets. There are no children sitting on the steps, playing in the streets, not anymore. Not like 148th Street.

The daughter Joey and I adopted from Thailand, Belinda, and her husband, Jay Jones, have two girls, Rachel, eleven, and Leah (named for me), eight, half African American, half Thai. They live in New Jersey.

Dinah left Hollywood with her husband, Arthur Mortell, and three sons—twins, Oliver and Desi, nine, and sixteen-year-old
Dashiell. They live happily ever after on Bainbridge Island, Washington. When I need advice, Dinah is my go-to girl.

Dinah flew here to New York City from Bainbridge Island this past Christmas, Dinah’s family and Belinda’s camping out on our living room floor. Sunday morning, I woke and padded to the kitchen in my white cotton nightgown. It was eleven a.m.; Dinah was to leave for the airport at two p.m. For two hours we talked in the kitchen. The heart of our house, the kitchen. We nodded across the generations, across the years. Belinda, Dinah, and me, with the grand-girls and -boys in and out. And the sweet sound of nine-year-old Desi playing his violin floated in. Phyllis making prosciutto sandwiches for Belinda, Dinah picking up lox and cream cheese on bagels from Murray’s deli around the corner on Broadway for the plane ride home. Busy—leaving.

We sat across the dining room table—looked at each other, the tomato and me.

“Joey,” I said, “look what we did!”

The family we created surrounded us.

Joey and
me.

Family portraits of my mother with her siblings and parents, soon after they arrived in the States from Odessa. My mother is on the left in the first picture, and wearing the white hat in the second.

Mom, left, with Fremo, while she was pregnant with me.

Mom and me.

Abner and me.

Dad and me at Pocono Camp Club.

Practicing my ballet on 148th Street, at age five.