My Year of Rest and Relaxation (33)

I hadn’t been to a funeral since my mother’s, almost exactly seven years earlier. Hers had been quick and informal in the funeral home chapel. The guests barely filled the first few rows—just me and my father’s sister, a few neighbors, the housekeeper. The names in her address book had been doctors—hers and my father’s. My high school art teacher was there. “Don’t let this take you all the way down, honey,” he said. “You can always call me if you need a grown-up to lean on.” I never called him.

My father’s funeral, on the other hand, had been a real production. There were printed programs, long speeches. People flew in from across the country to pay their respects. The pews in the university chapel were uncushioned, and the bones in my butt rocked against the hard wood. I sat beside my mother in the front row, trying to ignore her sighs and throat clearings. Her frosty lipstick was put on so thick it started melting down her chin. When the president of the university announced that the science department would establish a research fellowship in my father’s name, my mother let out a groan. I reached for her hand and held it. It was bold of me to make such a move, but I thought we might bond now that we had something so huge in common—a dead man whose last name we shared. Her hand was cold and bony, like my father’s had been on his deathbed just days earlier. An obvious foreshadowing to me now, but I didn’t think of that then. Less than a minute later, she let go of my hand to dig around in her purse for her little pillbox. I didn’t know exactly what she was taking that day—an upper, I thought. She kept her coat on in the chapel during the ceremony, fidgeted with her stockings, her hair, glanced back viciously at the crowded pews behind us each time she heard somebody sigh or sniffle or whisper. The hours felt interminable, waiting for everyone to arrive, sitting through the formal proceedings. My mother agreed. “This is like waiting for a train to hell,” she whispered at some point, not to me directly, but up at the chapel ceiling. “I’m exhausted.” Highway to hell. Slow road to hell. Express bus. Taxicab. Rowboat. First-class ticket. Hell was the only destination she ever used in her metaphors.

When it was time for people to go up and say nice things about my father, she glared at the line forming up the central aisle.

“They think they’re special now because they know someone who died.” She rolled her red, quick-roving eyes. “It makes them feel important. Egomaniacs.” Friends, colleagues, coworkers, loyal students spoke emotionally from the rostrum. The people wept. My mother squirmed. I could see our reflections in the gloss of the casket in front of us. We were both just pale, floating, jittery heads.

I couldn’t sleep in Reva’s bed. It was a lost cause.

I decided to take a shower. I got up and undressed and turned the water on with a squelch, watched the bathroom fill with steam. Since I’d started sleeping all the time, my body had gotten very thin. My muscles had turned soft. I still looked good in clothes, but naked I looked fragile, weird. Protruding ribs, wrinkles around my hips, loose skin around my abdomen. My collarbones jutted out. My knees looked huge. I was all sharp corners at that point. Elbows, clavicles, hip points, the knobby vertebrae of my neck. My body was like a wooden sculpture in need of sanding. Reva would have been horrified to see me naked like that. “You look like a skeleton. You look like Kate Moss. No fair,” she would have said.

The one time Reva saw me completely naked had been at the Russian bathhouse on East Tenth Street. But that was a year and a half earlier, before I’d gone on my “sleep diet,” Reva would go on to call it. She had wanted to “drop weight” before going to a pool party in the Hamptons for the Fourth of July.

“I know it’s just water weight I’m sweating off,” Reva said. “But it’s a good quick fix.”

We went on the one day of the week the baths were open to women only. Most of the girls wore bikinis. Reva wore a one-piece bathing suit and wrapped a towel around her hips every time she stood up. It seemed silly to me. I went nude.

“What are you so uptight about, Reva?” I asked her while we were resting by the ice-water pool. “There aren’t any men around. Nobody’s ogling you.”

“It’s not about the men,” she said. “Women are so judgmental. They’re always comparing.”

“But why do you care? It’s not a contest.”

“Yes, it is. You just can’t see it because you’ve always been the winner.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. But I knew Reva was right. I was hot shit. People were always telling me I looked like Amber Valletta. Reva was pretty, too, of course. She looked like Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox put together. I didn’t tell her that then. She would have been prettier if she knew how to relax. “Chill,” I said. “It’s not that big a deal. You think people are going to judge you for not looking like a supermodel?”

“That’s usually the first judgment people make in this city.”

“What do you care what people think about you? New Yorkers are assholes.”

“I care, okay? I want to fit in. I want to have a nice life.”

“God, Reva. That’s pathetic.”

Then she got up and disappeared inside the eucalyptus mist in the steam room. It was a mild skirmish, one of hundreds about how arrogant I was for not counting my blessings. Oh, Reva.

The shower stall in her basement bathroom was small, the door clouded, gray glass. There was no soap, only a bottle of Prell. I washed my hair and stayed under the water until it ran cold. When I got out, I could hear the news blaring through the ceiling. The towels Reva had left for me on the sink were pink and seafoam green and smelled faintly of mildew. I rubbed the fog off the mirror and looked at myself again. My hair splatted against my neck. Maybe I should cut it even shorter, I thought. Maybe I would enjoy that. Boy cut. Gamine. I’d look like Edie Sedgwick. “You’d look like Charlize Theron,” Reva would have said. I wrapped the towel around myself and lay back down on the bed.