Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

Maybe if he had been a Temple Brother, we wouldn’t have had such a hard time finding a rabbi to officiate the funeral. Years before, on one of my parents’ evening walks, my father had mentioned to my mother that he wanted to be cremated when he died. He didn’t like the idea of his body rotting underground.

My mother listened, though she had assumed they would be laid to rest alongside each other, in the final conjugal bed.

“I worry about being cold,” she said.

“You won’t feel it.”

Plates were scraped, tomato sauce slid into garbage bags. I inserted the quadratic formula while my parents circled the subdivision on foot. Where did they go? What did people in cars think? We didn’t even have the pretense of a dog. Then off to college — Nietzsche, penetration.

“Daddy said he wanted cremation. What do you think?”

Suddenly, my mother and I were married. Husband’s dead? Meet your new husband. Standing tall at five foot two, your new husband is majoring in Cultural Studies and has recently become sexually active. What did I think?

We had him cremated, against Jewish law, and somehow I was put in charge of convincing a rabbi to not bury him. I made phone calls. I hoisted the Bergen County Yellow Pages onto the kitchen counter. I argued that I had been bat mitzvahed at Temple Beth Fill-In-the-Blank, that I had danced with my father at Fill-In, that my father had taken my bony wrists and spun me out and back in front of laughing, clapping friends of the family.

No rabbi found this story moving. No rabbi would touch it. They were all too afraid of the Board, the unseen uglies behind the temple throne, just waiting for a kashrut scandal or an opportunity to give out pens. Finally, we imported a guy from Westchester County, and at this point I don’t know why we bothered, because he was obviously some kind of third-rate rabbi, and he smiled waxily when he met me, grateful to have the gig.

—

THE FUNERAL HOME DIRECTOR told my mother, my aunts, and me to wait in the back office of Diforio Memorial. We would be called out when everyone was seated. Rows of brown metal chairs stood stacked against one wall, and behind them someone had hung a sheet over a giant cross. The outline of the cross was still visible, the hiding perfunctory, as though the funeral home director had applied the “If the Deceased Is Jewish” section from the mortician’s instruction manual. I stared at my father’s sisters as they asked the rabbi pointless logistical questions, a frenzy in black suits. How did they know to own them? Nothing could stop them from putting on pantyhose or a gold bracelet, not even death.

That morning, my aunt Susan had reached into the bottom of her divorcée suitcase, past balls of stockings and cream-colored underwear, and tossed me a pair of tights. Sternly, like she was trying to teach me a lesson. The underwear chilled me, with its connotations of the aunt’s lonely crotch, underserved by the male divorcés in her area. I wondered if the rabbi was single. Maybe she could date him. The rabbi had thick lips, and a tie the color of lox. All morning, I kept thinking about eating the tie. Maybe we would get to have lox after we had returned to the house, where everything would smell like onions and cleaning fluid. Oh, there would be lox. Some woman would make it appear, and then she would disappear, so the lox would appear to have appeared on its own.

“The best thing about being Jewish,” the rabbi kidded us, “is that we keep our funerals short.”

Aunt Susan laughed conspiratorially, like you wouldn’t believe what her Taoist friends had put her through.

I turned to eye-roll with my mother, who had always complained that Susan was a flirt. But my mother was staring at me.

“What?” I said.

I knew what. My nipples were poking at my dress. There’s not much to do about pokey nipples, to be honest, except try to warm them so they flatten. But if you rub them, they might get pokier.

“Do you want my jacket?” she said. She started to take it off.

“I don’t want it, it’s ugly.”

“Are you sure? It’s freezing in there.”

“Ma, okay, it’s about to start.”

My mother, my aunts, and I marched past the other mourners like we were getting our diplomas. All eyes pitied me, the only child. Well, I pitied them — the couples inching their minivans through frozen streets, the husbands grim at the wheel, the wives gym-thin and pissed, with a casserole sliding around in the backseat. The same guests would probably watch me walk down the aisle at my wedding, except they would be transformed, yarmulkes white instead of black, wrinkles powdered over, earrings stretching earlobes scrotal, lipstick that they would reapply publicly and often — whipping out compacts, holding the mirror level with their teeth.

Now my aunts were mouthing “Thank you for coming” to the guests, who were mouthing “I’m sorry” back to them. Coral mouths in motion. Hands rubbed the slack skin beneath chins. The room was a chorus of “tsk”s. I wanted to announce that my father hated it when people spoke without sound, hated the gentle clicks of tongues, the almost imperceptible suction of lips coming apart.

“Dr. Alan Jacobs was a gentle man who loved to cook,” the rabbi boomed.

My aunt Sharon had bragged to the rabbi that my father had been a doctor, not realizing that the rabbi was going to use my father’s full title throughout the eulogy.

“Dr. Alan Jacobs valued family and life’s simple pleasures.

“Dr. Alan Jacobs worked to strengthen his community.

“Dr. Alan Jacobs was good at his work, but he knew that the real work began when he came home from the hospital.

“I never met Dr. Alan Jacobs, but I can feel his warmth in the room on this cold, snowy day.”

My mother pulled tissue after tissue out of her pocketbook like a magician. She handed the damp ones to me, until I hissed, “Stop.” My aunts sat with their hands clasped for Dr. Alan Jacobs, while the rabbi broke his own rule about brevity. Clearly, they all preferred the capitalized version of the man — Brother, Husband, Reader of Newspapers. But my father had undermined their efforts by refusing to leave behind solid evidence. There was no coffin at the front of the chapel, no lacquered death box with a tallis draped over it. The rabbi was lecturing about the air.

As I sat on the brown cushioned bench in Diforio Memorial, clutching my mother’s soggy tissues, I started to miss college. At college, there were joints to roll and a part-time bisexual with an encyclopedic mind who came over to roll the joints and fuck. He had taken my virginity. He had memorized my mother’s maiden name; he had memorized the maiden names of the mothers of the two boys he had deflowered, in addition to me. Schatz and Ducille. My mother was Tieman. Harriet Tieman, rhymes with semen.

“Are you going to tell Harriet Tieman I’m your boyfriend?” he would ask.

“You’re my fake boyfriend,” I said. I tried not to feel proprietary. He wasn’t even in the closet. Someone had nicknamed him “Big Gay Rob.” But sitting on the brown bench in Diforio Memorial, my mind wandered. Maybe the fake boyfriend was fucking someone else while I was away at my father’s funeral. Maybe the fake boyfriend was fucking a boy. Without a condom.

Except, after the service, I saw him standing in the lobby with the other mourners. He was wearing a suit, and he didn’t look sad enough.

“I made amazing time,” he said. “Just under three hours.” He named a series of highways I hadn’t heard of. He handed me a sympathy card from a group of girls who lived with me. The card was actually a picture of the girls themselves, with me Photoshopped into it, and “We miss you!” scrawled over all of us.

“Are you surprised I came?” he said.