My Year of Rest and Relaxation (29)

“Buried her next to my father,” I said.

“See, we should have buried her. At least you still have your parents somewhere. Like, they haven’t been burned to ashes. At least they’re in the ground, their bones are still there, I mean, in one place. You still have that.”

“Pull over,” I told her. I’d spotted a McDonald’s up ahead. “Let’s go through the drive-through. Let me buy you breakfast.”

“I’m on a diet,” Reva said.

“Let me buy me breakfast then,” I said.

She pulled into the parking lot, got in line.

“Do you visit them? Your parents’ graves?” she asked. Reva mistook my sigh of frustration for an expulsion of buried sadness. She turned to me with a high whining, “Mmm!” frowning in sympathy, and leaned on the horn by accident. It honked like a wounded coyote. She gasped. The person in the car ahead of us gave her the finger. “Oh, God. Sorry!” she yelled, and honked again in apology. She looked at me. “There’s food at home. There’s coffee, everything.”

“All I want is coffee from McDonald’s. That’s all I ask. I came all this way.”

Reva put the car into park. We waited.

“I can’t even tell you how disturbing it was at the crematorium. It’s the last place you want to be when you’re in mourning. They give you all this literature about how they burn the bodies, like I really need to know. And in one of the pamphlets, they describe how they cremate dead babies in these little individual ‘metal pans.’ That’s what they call them—‘metal pans.’ I can’t stop thinking about that. ‘Pans.’ It’s so gross. Like they’re making personal pan pizzas. Isn’t that just awful? Doesn’t that make you sick?”

The car ahead pulled forward. I motioned for Reva to drive up to the intercom.

“Two large coffees, extra sugar, extra cream,” I said and pointed to Reva to repeat the order. She did, and ordered herself an Oreo McFlurry.

“You can sleep over if you want,” Reva said, driving up to the first window. “It’s New Year’s Eve, you know.”

“I have plans in the city.”

Reva knew I was lying. I looked at her, daring her to challenge me, but she just smiled and passed my debit card to the woman in the window.

“I wish I had plans in the city,” Reva said.

We pulled up to the next window and Reva handed me my coffees. The lids smelled like cheap perfume and burnt hamburger.

“I can call you a cab back to the station after the reception,” Reva went on, her voice high and phony as she spooned her McFlurry into her mouth. “Ken is coming, I think,” she said. “And a few other people from work. Do you want to stay for dinner at least?” Speaking with her mouth full was another thing I couldn’t stand about Reva.

“I need a nap first,” I said. “Then I’ll see how I feel.”

Reva was quiet for a while, cold white puffs of air rising up off her tongue as she licked the long plastic spoon. The heating was way up. I was sweating under the fur. She stuck the McFlurry cup between her knees and continued to drive and eat.

“You can take a nap in my room,” she said. “It should be quiet down there. My relatives are over, but they won’t think you’re being rude or anything. We don’t have to be at the funeral home until two.”

We passed a high school, a library, a strip mall. Why anyone would want to live in a place like that was beyond me. Farmingdale State College, a Costco, five cemeteries in a row, a golf course, block after block of white picket fences with perfectly snowblown driveways and walkways. It made sense that Reva had come from a place as lame as this. It explained why she slaved away to fit in and make a home for herself in New York City. Her father, she’d told me, was an accountant. Her mother had been a secretary at a Jewish day school. Reva was, like me, an only child.

“This is it,” she said as we pulled into the driveway of a tan-colored brick house. It was ranch-style and small, probably built in the fifties. Just by looking at it from the outside, I could tell that it had wall-to-wall carpeting, humid, sticky air, low ceilings. I imagined cabinets full of crap, flies flurrying around a wooden bowl of brown bananas, an old refrigerator covered in magnets pinning down expired coupons for toilet paper and dish soap, a pantry packed with cheap store-brand foods. It looked like the opposite of my parents’ house upstate. Their house was an eerily spare Tudor Colonial, very austere, very brown. The furniture was all dark, heavy wood, which the housekeeper polished religiously with lemon-scented Pledge. Brown leather sofa, brown leather armchair. The floors were varnished and shiny. There were stained-glass windows in the living room and a few large waxy plants in the foyer. Otherwise it was colorless inside. Monochromatic drapes and carpets. There was very little to catch your eye—cleared countertops, everything blank and dim. My mother was not the type to use alphabet magnets on the fridge to hold up my kindergarten finger paintings or first attempts at writing out words. She kept the walls of the house mostly clear. It was as though anything visually interesting was too much aggravation on my mother’s eyes. Maybe that’s why she ran out of the Guggenheim that one time she came to visit me in the city. Only the master bedroom, my mother’s room, had any clutter in it—glass bottles of perfume and ashtrays, unused exercise equipment, piles of pastel and beige-colored clothing. The bed was a king, low to the ground, and whenever I slept in it, I felt very far away from the world, like I was in a spaceship or on the moon. I missed that bed. The stiff blankness of my mother’s eggshell sheets.