The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (35 page)

My parents, who are sitting side by side, each with a phone to an ear, grab each other’s hand as the letter continues to extol my father’s fourteen-carat-gold virtues and moves on to what to me passed for wisdom.

1. Don’t marry a man who thinks you talk too much, doesn’t make you laugh at least twice a day, or farts in front of you and isn’t embarrassed. (Feel free to disregard the last part after six months of dating.)
   

2. Never wear ankle strap shoes, unless your legs turn out to be a lot longer than mine.
   

3. Learn to roast a chicken.
   

4. Even though Mandarin Chinese would be more practical, make French your second language. You’ll be at home in Paris, where I hope you will take a junior year abroad. When you do, order the hot chocolate at Angelina’s.
   

5. Print out your pictures and put them in an album. Label! Date!
   

6. Don’t waste time balancing your checkbook.
   

7. When you’re crabby, fake a good mood.
   

8. Never ask a two-year-old a question to which she can answer, “No!”
   

9. Make at least one new friend every year.
   

10. Don’t judge people by where they went to college.
    

11. When in doubt, paint your walls the color of vanilla ice cream.
    

12. Remember that Big Macs have 24 fat grams.
    

13. Keep your perfume in the refrigerator.
    

And so on. The list covers every area of banal daily life—hair, friendship, diet, skin care, and, of course, home decoration—until it finally ends.

But there is no ahead for Molly Divine Marx, and my parents are shutting down. “Stop, Barry,” my father says. “We’ve heard enough.”

“The thing is,” Barry asks impatiently, “this is what’s spooking me. Do you think Molly … knew she was going to die?”

“Like when you’re thinking about someone and then the phone rings,” my mother says, “that funny feeling in your bones?”

“Not exactly. I’m looking at this letter, which Molly clearly put a lot of thought into, and wondering about … something else.”

The silence between Highland Park and Manhattan drops like a shroud. “Do you honestly think our daughter might have taken her own life?” my father says, barely choking out the words, as outraged as if Barry has accused me of molesting a child. I love how my parents rise to my defense. They have never made me prouder.

“That’s preposterous,” my mother says, trying not to bellow at her son-in-law, who she knows is upset. She can’t even think suicide. “You lived with our daughter and she was sunshine, pure gold. Is there something you want to tell us?”

There isn’t.

Did you make our daughter miserable?
they are both thinking, and Barry gets that as the message oozes through the phone lines.

“Have you called Lucy yet?” my mother asks.

“Maybe you want to tell her yourself?” Barry asks, hoping they’ll bite.

“We’ll call to warn her, but you’re the one with the letter,” my father points out. “She should hear it.”

Even if she’ll laugh at my quotidian wisdom.

Barry says goodbye and puts the letter in the inside left pocket of his sport jacket. The envelope is as alive to him as I am not, throbbing
for attention. Five minutes later he’s in a taxi, debating whom to call first, Lucy or Hicks, when his cell phone rings.

“Let’s get one thing straight—my sister would never kill herself,” Lucy says. She has traded her usual voice for the cool, low tone of a corporate president ready to eat another company alive. “I don’t know how you can suggest it, even as a boneheaded theory. She’d never commit suicide. Absolute idiocy.”

Please make Barry understand this
, Lucy, I think as I watch her drive to work and talk on speakerphone.

“Who’s saying she did?” Barry asks.

“Whatever you found I need to see. Immediately.”
Molly was a sentimental fool
, Lucy thinks.
This is probably one of those earnest letters a mother writes when a child is born and whips out when the kid graduates from high school. She probably got the idea from a women’s magazine
.

Lucy is almost right. I wrote the letter when Annabel turned three and was planning to give it to her at her bat mitzvah or when she got her period, whichever rite of passage arrived first.

“You know, Lucy, this letter doesn’t seem like the sort of thing to fax.” Is that what she wants, to prove that he hasn’t faked it? He tries to stop short of sarcasm, but in any conversation he’s ever had with his sister-in-law, it’s the rhythm he knows best. “But let me read this one part now. ‘
I have always hoped that someday you’d have a brother, but I’m going to share a secret. Before you were born, I asked God for a little girl, and that’s exactly what I would pray for again, because I’ve had a sister, and there is nothing more wonderful in the whole wide world
.’”

“Barry!” Lucy screams as she skids to avoid an oncoming car. “Stop! I’m going to get into an accident. That’s all my parents need, two dead daughters.”

“I’ll overnight you and your parents copies of the letter—you’ll have them by tomorrow,” he says, bordering on kind. “And I should alert Hicks. Agree?” He doesn’t care what she thinks, because he’s already made up his mind.

Lucy likes being asked. “You should,” she says. Tears drip on the front of her jacket. She wishes her eyes had windshield wipers. “So I guess we’ll talk later, after the letter arrives?”

“We will,” Barry says. His taxi passes a flower shop selling big tubs of blue hydrangeas. I filled our home with these flowers the moment
they were sold each spring.
It’s a sign
, he tells himself.
Go ahead. Ask
. He flashes to the incident with Lucy at Annabel’s school, about which he’s still fuming, no matter that my sister has written her own letter to him, of deep apology. Barry considers that he may be losing all reason and that his mother will be ready to commit him to an institution. “Lucy?” he says. “I need a favor….”

She braces herself for a nasty hit.
No, I will not fuck myself
, she thinks.
Why am I being civil to Barry? This guy is vermin
.

“After the High Holidays, could you please come to New York? It’s time that someone goes through Molly’s stuff. I can’t bear to do it myself.”
And Molly would hate it if I asked my mother
. “I was going to ask Delfina or Brie or …”
But now that you’ve been on house arrest for all these months at your parents’, you’ve done your time, and I can ask you
, Barry thinks.

You need me
, Lucy thinks.
But more importantly, my sister needs me
.0 The moment for a smart-ass retort disappears. “I’ll be there.”

watch Barry slip into a maroon velvet pew. “What do you think of all this?” I ask Bob, who’s never attended a Yom Kippur service. He likes bagels, Billy Crystal, and Sandra Bullock (Jew—not a Jew? Discuss) and says
mazel tov
, but that’s as Jewish as he’s ever gotten.

“Why isn’t the place packed? What’s with the empty seats? Those of us raised with Confession couldn’t get by baring our souls one measly time a year. We’d be hanging from the rafters and snaking a line around the block, banging to get in, begging to upload our sins.”

Why didn’t I bring Bob last night, when the confessions were in freefall and eleven people tried to squeeze into rows meant for eight? Almost every soul had stripped to emotional underwear, with varied degrees of contrition and honesty. When the collective sob of the Kol Nidre bounced off the vaulted Moorish ceiling, there was a collective swaying and moaning, well-dressed willows in the wind.

“You’ll see—the place will fill up as the day goes by.” I turn my attention to Barry, standing bull’s-eye in a circle of loneliness, trying to pray. I’d love to know for what, exactly.

“For the sin which we have committed before You under duress or willingly,” Rabbi Strauss Sherman says in his express-from-heaven
boom. Worshippers listen carefully to the spiritual boilerplate. “For the sin which we have committed before You by hard-heartedness … inadvertently … with an utterance of the lips … with immorality … openly or secretly … with knowledge and with deceit … for all these, God of pardon, pardon us, forgive us, atone for us.” After Rabbi S.S. says this, the invisible but exuberant choir repeats it, should anyone have missed the point.

Pardon me
, Barry is praying.
Forgive me
. Like my Papa Louie and every male ancestor before him, he’s wrapped inside a silky blue-striped
tallit
, determined to make God, today’s star, hear him.

Yesterday, after Kitty’s dinner—matzo balls floating in golden chicken soup, tangy gefilte fish, prime rib, baked potatoes the size of Annabel’s shoes, and mile-high apple tart—Barry started fasting. For him this is new. Already, his stomach is saying,
Feed me
, and because he didn’t wean himself off caffeine a few weeks in advance—my secret weapon—his head throbs. I’m not sure why our forefathers felt this particular physical hardship put a person in the mood for prayer. Maybe there’s someone in the Duration who can clue me in on that.

I’ve never thought of either Barry or myself as religious. Even though he’d recently been appointed a trustee of the congregation and once in a while we’d attend a service, on most Friday nights we’d go to a movie, miles from a sweetly braided challah. Since I died, however, Barry—along with other mourners—has ushered in the Sabbath at temple and made a sizable donation to Annabel’s school. As a result, on the fifth floor of this very building there’s a well-stocked Molly Divine Marx Art Room whose centerpiece is an aquarium filled with hundreds of mollies in cocktail-hour hues—Gold Dust, Creamsicle, and other shimmers, plus the occasional active-wear Molly in neon green or orange.

“Want to see Big Molly?” I ask Bob, eager to get away from Barry’s obvious discomfort—and to lose my own. “She’s a Ghost Pearl.” I often get lost watching her and like to believe a speck of my soul circulates within this plump female and her hundreds of babies.

“Later,” Bob says as he settles in.

“For the sin which we have committed before You by false denial and lying,” the rabbi continues.

Bob gives me that look of his that telegraphs,
Get serious
. Maybe he
has some atoning to do—I can’t get into his head and he rarely talks about himself—but my better guess is that he feels I could do with some of my own confessing. There’s plenty of transgression, wickedness, and moral trespassing to go around. I need to be accountable.

Rabbi S.S. has moved along to the sin of scoffing. I consider it. Nope. Scoffing, not my thing.

“For the sin which we have committed before You by a haughty demeanor.” On this count, my mind free-associates to Kitty. Where is that woman? Does she feel she needs no atonement? And what about the also absent Stephanie, who must be a member of this synagogue, since her son attends their nursery school? Does she honestly feel she’s sailed through the year sin-free? Come on. Let me count the ways. But I’m running up my own tab thinking about both of them, especially now that Rabbi S.S. is shifting into Molly territory.

My own sins are manifold, bacteria on a sponge. My essence curls inside Barry, so that we might beseech God as a team, as together as we’ve ever been. He is praying intensely, with the strain on his face I see when he does a pull-up, trying his best to make the Big Guy hear him.
I blew it
, he’s saying.
Molly is gone and I’m to blame. To blame. To blame, to blame
.

“And for the sin we have committed before you by a confused heart.”

A confused heart? Hey, God, over here. Was this always in the service, or did You slip it in expressly for me? I’m still waiting to meet You in the Duration, but I have not given up. You bet my heart was, and is, confused. It’s unhinged, in a spin. Do I have regrets? Does Yankee Stadium sell peanuts? Maybe I shouldn’t have married Barry or should have gotten out early, after the wedding or even before. But then Annabel wouldn’t be here, and how can I regret my child? I know You wanted Annabel to be. Which leads me to think that Barry and I could have learned to live happily ever after, Your five-year plan. Okay, God, maybe we got a running start in the wrong direction, but thanks to Dr. Stafford we’d reversed course. Some people grow up at twenty, the rest of us by forty if we’re lucky. But yes, God, in short, my heart was confused.