Years ago, I had a friend.
"Audrey." She was beautiful and rich. I loved her.
She invited me into intimacy. At least I
thought she did. She said the kinds of things to me that I would not say to
another person. She said very frank, unflattering things about her children.
Her husband. Her lovers. Her parents. Herself. Her own medical history. I
thought, wow, we are really friends.
I confided in her, too.
I clearly remember one day, many years
ago. It was a bright, sunny, unusually warm, October day. I was standing by my
window, and I was crying.
It was my birthday.
I'm used to spending my birthday alone.
But this year, I thought I had a friend.
Her. I was so foolish. All week before my birthday, as I reached into my mailbox,
I kept anticipating feeling the card that I would receive from Audrey. I waited
for the phone call. The plan of what we'd do.
Nothing.
When she had confided in me, I had
confided in her. My birthday is hard for me, for reasons I don't need to go
into here. Just one of the reasons is that it is the anniversary of the death
of someone special to me – special to many people. He was killed in a car
accident. He was not the driver. He was beautiful and young. I was the last
person in the family to see him alive. I remember him coming down the stairs,
pausing, right across from me, at the kitchen sink to take a drink of water. I
admired his back. He was wearing a fine shirt, a date-night shirt. He turned
and walked out the back door. For years I dreamt that at that moment, I jumped
up, ran to the back door, grabbed the handle he was letting go of, and stopped
him, and said, "Don't go."
But I didn't do that. He did go. And he
never came back.
Well, there's that. And my birthday is
hard for me for other reasons, as well.
So, yeah. When this beautiful, rich
woman convinced me that I had a friend, I confided in her about this, and I
assumed that she'd get it, and at least send me a card. And so I stood by the
window on an unusually warm October day and cried.
I never want to feel that way again.
After a while, I think she got bored
with me, and she ghosted me. Audrey won't ever make me feel that way again. Or maybe
we'll run into each other and I'll be the proverbial Charlie Brown with the
football all over again.
***
Here's another story about friends.
I used to phone S. regularly. I have
phone phobia so that I used to call him so often is testimony to how comfortable
I felt with S. Once I phoned him on Thanksgiving. His wife answered the phone. She
said that S had gone for a walk by himself. She said that Thanksgiving was
always a hard day for him. He had grown up in an abusive home, and Thanksgiving
brought back memories, and drove him into a funk. So he was off by himself,
trodding the hilltops. Something about how M described her husband's solitary trek
made it all sound so Byronic. I immediately imagined a woolen cape flapping
behind him against the storm-lashed sky, as he paced the moors, alone with his
grief, except of course for his trusty Irish wolfhound, named Pilot, or Hound
of the Baskervilles, or something.
This all happened over thirty years ago.
To this day, I am still super careful around
S on Thanksgiving. It's a hard day for him. I want, at the very least, not to make
it worse for him. He and I are no longer close enough for me to step up and address
all this directly, to try to offer him TLC. But in my heart, I do. I think of S
every Thanksgiving. I send him silent vibes of TLC. Because I care about him.
Because it's a hard day for him. Because someone told me once, one time, that
Thanksgiving is a hard day for S, and I never forgot. I penciled it in to my
internal date book.
I did this because I care about S a great
deal.
***
I know that some people erect unbreachable
barriers around friendship. You don't support Trump? Blocked and unfriended.
BTDT, many, many times. You support Israel / You are poor / You are black / You
aren't cool. We can't be friends.
I don't do that.
I’m not saying, here, that if someone
doesn't send me a birthday card that I would cut them off as a friend.
I'm saying that when Audrey didn't send
me a birthday card that year, I recognized that she and I were not friends.
***
I never thought I'd live this long.
That's part of what happens when your brother dies young on your birthday. The
last line of his obituary was, "The man lived in this area all his
life." I'd show them, the bastards that cheated us again and again. I'd
travel. I'd see the world. I'd do risky things. Live fast, play hard, die
young, leave a good looking corpse. That last is no longer an option for me.
When Antoinette was sick, I asked God to
take me instead of her. She had so much to live for. Husband. Children. A home.
Retirement benefits. Me? None of that. God didn't listen. The bastard.
So here I am, it's 2025, and the hard
day is coming around again.
***
Through Facebook, I have reconnected
with a kid I used to know in our small hometown. She has matured into a very
kind woman. We don't talk at all. She never comments on my posts and I just
generally "like" hers. But she is kind. Big heart. She sent me a
card. I was so touched.
Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to
spend two days at St. Mary's by the Sea, a blessed refuge for women dealing
with cancer. To my great surprise, they sent me a hand-written birthday card! I
don't even remember telling them it was my birthday.
Almost forty years ago, in Poland, I met
one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life. T. T and I were constantly together.
We traveled to Bialystok together, in a fun but unsuccessful effort to see if
we could discover anything about my family, which was from a nameless village
nearby. We saw European buffalo together; we met survivors of Nazi slave labor
programs, a peasant couple who put us up. After their exploitation in Poland
was over, they walked back to Poland, barefoot. God bless those two people! T
and I got on the wrong train together. We were together on Dyngus, and one of
us got drenched. T met the love of her life, as I looked on. The only creatures
I've ever met that are more adorable than T are puppies and kittens.
But time marches on. We haven't seen
each other in years and we haven't kept up. But she sent me a birthday card
this year. That meant so much.
Another wonderful woman says she sent me
a birthday card. I never got it, but I'm touched that she sent me a screencap
of the card.
***
And then there's this. Someone, who
would like to remain anonymous, did an amazing thing. X looked up where my
brother, father, and mother – they died in that order – are buried, all in the
same grave. I was here for all the deaths, and two of the internments, but I
wasn't really paying attention to the location. Feh. Someone could pick me up
today, drive me to my next doctor's appointment, and I would have no idea where
I am. If someone else is driving – even if I'm driving – I'm not spatially
oriented.
I remember green grass, and trees. And
that's it.
And then X offered to take me there, on
my birthday, the fiftieth anniversary of Phil's death.
Okay, I said.
Problem: A nor'easter was due to arrive
on my birthday. So we went the day before.
I've never visited the grave of a loved
one in the US. In Slovakia, once, I visited Uncle John's grave. That's it.
I like walking through cemeteries, but
other people's cemeteries. I like them for the grass, the quiet, and the statuary,
not for any connection. I have willed my own body to science. Once the spirit
leaves the body, that's it. The physical remains are no more alive than the
dead skin, loose hair, shed blood, exhaled breath, clipped nails, and other
unmentionable stuff that our bodies discard daily. At least that's what I
think.
The sky was gray and cloudy. There was
some drizzle.
I noticed immediately that the cemetery where
my family members are buried is for poor people. All the markers are flat, at
most simply adorned stones flush with the surface of the earth. The cemetery is
not well maintained. The ground is uneven and many stones tilted or sank. These
stones, including my family members' stones, will soon be swallowed up by earth
and time. Maybe this will become, like the rest of New Jersey, a strip mall.
We had to walk around because we didn't
know the exact location. This is a Catholic cemetery and I read many Polish,
Italian, and Irish names. And then I read "Goska."
My mother's name isn't even on the
stone. There really isn't room. Just my brother and my dad. Birth year, death
year, not the exact dates, dates I know all too well. No quotes. No carvings.
No memories.
I called to X. X, who was conducting a
search in a different section, approached.
I don't know why I've lived this long. It
all seems pretty pointless. And it ends, at least for these three members of my
family, like this. I'm guessing that no one else has ever visited their graves.
Maybe Antoinette? I can't ask her.
What's the point?
I stood there, on the uneven ground,
under the drizzle, staring at the stone beneath me. I didn't feel anything
special.
I talk to my father regularly. He was a
terrific driver. When I have to merge onto a busy highway, I ask him, out loud,
for help.
I try not to think about Phil too much,
because when I do, I cry. Just once a year, on my birthday.
My mother … every time I look in the
mirror. Bake. Clean. Wish she had left some of her writing with us. She was so
damn talented. The stories she could tell.
But this stone, and the bones and ashes –
my mother, the latecomer, had to be cremated to fit – no, none spoke to me.
X, not I, had purchased red carnations.
X had no way of knowing that that's a very Polish flower. I placed the red
carnations on the stone.
X and I moved on.
X bought me pizza. And X brought me
flowers.
The next day, my actual birthday, I read
the latest Nazi book, and worked on a review of it, and ate leftover pizza. And
I did not cry.
