My Year of Rest and Relaxation (30)

I sucked down the rest of coffee number one and put the empty cup in my Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale’s. Reva parked the car in the driveway next to a rusting burgundy minivan and an old yellow Volvo station wagon.

“Come meet my relatives,” she said. “And then I’ll show you where you can lie down for a bit.” She led me up the shoveled pathway to the house. She was talking again. “Since her passing, I’ve just been so exhausted all the time. I haven’t been sleeping well with all these strange dreams. Creepy. Not really nightmares. Just weird. Totally bizarre.”

“Everybody thinks their dreams are weird, Reva,” I said.

“I’m overwhelmed, I guess. It’s been hard, but also sort of beautiful in this sad and peaceful way. You know what she said before she died? She said, ‘Don’t worry so much trying to be everybody’s favorite. Just go have fun.’ That really hit me, ‘everybody’s favorite.’ Because it’s true. I do feel the pressure to be like that. Do you think I’m like that? I guess I just never felt good enough. This is probably healthy for me, to have to face life now, you know, on my own. My dad and I aren’t really close. I’ll just introduce you to my relatives real quick,” she said, opening the front door.

The interior of the house was as I’d predicted—cushy, lime green carpeting, yellow glass chandelier, gold patterned wallpaper, and low stucco ceilings. The heat was blasting, and the air carried a smell of food and coffee and bleach. Reva led me into a sitting room with windows looking out onto the snow-covered front yard. A huge television was on mute, and a row of bald men wearing glasses sat on a long paisley sofa covered in glossy clear plastic. As Reva stomped snow off her boots on the mat, three fat women in black dresses and curlers in their hair came out from the kitchen with trays of donuts and Danishes.

“This is my friend, the one I had to go pick up,” she said to the women.

I nodded. I waved. I could feel one of the women eying my fur coat, my sneakers. She had Reva’s eyes—honey brown. Reva took a donut off the tray the woman carried.

“Is your friend hungry?” one woman asked.

“Pretty flowers,” said another.

“So you’re the friend we’ve heard so much about,” said the third.

“Are you hungry?” Reva asked.

I shook my head no, but Reva steered me into the brightly lit kitchen. “There’s so much food. See?” The counters and the table were covered with bowls of pretzels, chips, nuts, a plate of cheeses, crudité, dip, cookies. “We finished all the bagels,” Reva said. Coffee was brewing in a samovar on the counter. Huge pots on the stove steamed. “Chicken, spaghetti, some kind of ratatouille thing,” she said, lifting each of the lids. She was oddly unembarrassed. It seemed like she had dispensed with her usual uppity pretentions. She made no attempt to excuse herself for being homey, folksy, or whatever the word she would have used to describe living in a home like hers—“unglamorous.” Maybe she had just completely shut down. She opened the refrigerator to show me shelves of round Tupperware containers of steamed vegetables that she’d made in advance, she said, so she’d have something to snack on all day. She hadn’t been to the gym since Christmas. “But whatever. Now is not the time. Want some broccoli?” She popped the top off one of the containers. The smell hit me and nearly made me gag.

“Is this the sitting thing? You sit for ten days?” I asked, handing her the bouquet of flowers.

“Shiva is seven days. But no. My family isn’t religious or anything. They just like to sit around and eat a lot. My aunts and uncles drove in from New Jersey.” Reva put the flowers in the sink, poured herself a cup of coffee, tapped in a speck of Sweet’N Low from a crumpled packet she pulled from her pocket, and stirred mindlessly, staring down at the floor. I chugged the rest of the McDonald’s coffee and refilled it from the samovar. The fluorescent lights glared off the linoleum floor and hurt my eyes.

“I really need to lie down, Reva,” I told her. “I don’t feel well.”

“Oh, right,” she said. “Follow me.” We walked back through the sitting room. “Dad, don’t let anyone go downstairs. My friend needs some privacy.”

One of the bald men waved his hand dismissively and bit into a Danish. The crust flaked apart and fell down the front of his brown sweater-vest. He looked to me like a child molester. All those men did. But anyone would, in the right light, I thought—even I did. Even Reva. As her father tried to contain the flakes of pastry on his chest, the women got up and came at him, flicking the crumbs from his sweater onto their plates while he protested. If it weren’t for the specter of death hanging over everything, I would have felt like I was in a John Hughes movie. I tried to picture Anthony Michael Hall making an appearance, maybe as the neighbor’s kid coming to pay his condolences with a pie or a casserole. Or maybe this was a dark comedy, and Whoopi Goldberg would play the undertaker. I would have loved that. Just the thought of Whoopi soothed me. She really was my hero.

Reva led me down a spiral staircase into the basement, where there was a kind of rec room—rough blue carpeting, wood paneling, small windows up by the ceiling, a cluster of half-decent watercolors hanging crookedly above a frowning, wrinkled, mauve vinyl couch.

“Who did those?” I asked.

“Mom did. Aren’t they beautiful? My room’s through here.” Reva opened a door into a narrow, pink-tiled bathroom. The toilet tank was running. “It’s always like that,” she said, jiggling the handle to no effect. Another door led to her bedroom. It was dark and muggy inside. “It gets stuffy down here. No windows,” she whispered. She turned the bedside lamp on. The walls were painted black. The sliding door of the closet was cracked and had been taken off its runner and set to lean against the wall. The closet contained only a black dress and a few sweaters on hangers. Apart from a small chest of drawers, also painted black and topped with a sagging cardboard box, the room had very little in it. Reva turned on the ceiling fan.