My reverie ends abruptly when Tulip squats and begins to pee in some shrubbery. “Tulip,” I say, “where are your manners?”
Then I am no longer Juanita, I am Jill. And I don’t have any siblings, it’s just me and my mother in our musty, formal dining room, eating dinner on weeknights in silence. And my father isn’t dead, he’s just gone. And this is a dead man’s dog relieving herself in someone’s ficus. All at once I am sweaty and my back hurts and I realize we have been gone a while. I feel illogically as if I will be in trouble.
A brief but spectacular wave of panic submerges me: Where am I? These houses all look the same and it’s weirdly quiet. I turn in a slow circle, trying to orient myself by a lawn ornament, an unusually colored car, someone else in black, maybe carrying an aluminum-foiled casserole for the freezer of the dead man’s family. But it is so quiet. I give Tulip’s leash a yank and she reluctantly follows me. I am in a hurry now.
It is comical to be scurrying along calm suburban sidewalks like a city secretary in sneakers and stockings on her way to work, arms pumping. Tulip knows how comical it is, and she mocks me with her limp, bouncing tongue. But I am looking, looking, looking for something that will tell me how to get back to the dead man’s house and the dead man’s mourners. Perhaps I myself would not be missed, but Tulip is a faithful friend, and she is needed at that house, by those mourners.
I round corners with ridiculous intensity, like a medieval adventurer in a maze, making haphazard decisions that will lead me nowhere.
I end up on a fairly busy large street. There are three lanes in each direction on either side of a long, thin concrete island. The houses that stand defiantly facing this street look battered and brave, like people who refuse to take Prozac. The suburban dream of a few blocks past seems theoretical, phony, cowardly.
I am still confused and worried about finding my way back, imagining Danny looking for his dead father’s dog and not finding her, but the whoosh! of passing cars lulls me into complacency, and I ease back into a stroll, thinking: Fuck Danny. I deserve a dog, too.
Tulip does not seem to like the cars and the noise and the haste of this street. She is a product of fraudulent tranquillity, and this is all too much, too fast. So she begins to run, faster than she would on a precoronary morning jog with Howard, the dead man. She runs faster now than she would on the familiar, suburban streets that really are just a few blocks away from this honking, this tailpipe stench, this foolish race toward the next red light. She runs faster than I can, although I try, sweaty and hopeless, the strap of her leash welting my right palm. She is spooked, and I allow myself to hope for a split second that sandpaper-faced, sweetly stinking Neil will show up in a white robe or something, and shoot her.
I can’t keep up. My chest feels tight and too small, like Brenda’s today, like my mother’s might have, way back when, if only Neil had died. I let go of the leash and feel free, weightless, as if I’ve stepped onto a moving sidewalk. Tulip runs on, looking beautiful and completely out of place, her golden ears and leash flapping behind her as she gallops down the street, until I can no longer see her. And then I feel catheterized and clean. There is a blossoming somewhere near my heart full of relief and pain, eclipsing worry. Tulip is gone, and I am left with this weightlessness, the passing cars like the sound of an intense wind. My mother’s voice is as clear as water: She could get hit by a car. What if she can’t find her way home? For God’s sake, Jill, why can’t you do anything right? Howard had that dog for years. And then she is quieted by a huge passing truck and a trail of brown exhaust, which also disappears.
I walk on and imagine Danny looking for Tulip, wanting some silent, supportive canine company, Danny finding Tulip gone, Danny freaking out, throwing platters of cookies at startled guests, Danny losing father and dog all at once, death upon death, like a mathematical problem: loss squared. My mother will wonder why she didn’t just leave me by the coffeepot and butter cookies, why she insisted on making me useful. Brenda will stand by the window with a nervous-oblivious smile on her face and her eyes immutable and think: It’s such a nice day outside, somebody ought to take Tulip for a walk.
How This Night Is Different
After halfheartedly helping her mother clean, sweep, launder, and dust ritually with a feather and a candle borrowed from the emergency earthquake kit, Joanna congregated with her parents on the patio. They stood around a mop bucket and beamed at her.
“Jo-Jo,” her father said, the same way he’d said it when she was eight. “Show us what you found.”
Joanna held up the hametz: a quartered piece of white bread Ron had “hidden” for her to “find” (smack in the middle of the dining room table, on top of the microwave, on top of the washing machine, and by the kitchen sink, respectively). He nodded approvingly and flipped through the Haggadah for the appropriate blessing. He read it first in Hebrew and then in English.
“Any leaven in my possession, which I have not seen or removed, shall be as if it does not exist, and as the dust of earth.” To this last part, “the dust of earth,” Ron added a sinister and dramatic flourish, so it sounded almost as if he was promising, when he found you, to suck your blood.
The quartered bread sat soggy and rejected in Joanna’s sweaty open palm. On the inside of her left forearm the tattooed words “why” and “not” unfolded in small blue-black Times New Roman italics, followed by an outsize question mark. The words had been meaningful to her when she’d gotten them at twenty-three but had long since ceased to mean whatever they had meant, and had had no choice, then, but to assume new meanings as she grew ever older looking at them every day. She saw her mother try not to stare. Usually Joanna made a point of long sleeves in the presence of the ’rents, to spare them all the torment.
“An Orthodox guy in Pico-Robertson accidentally set himself on fire doing this last year,” Joanna informed them. Then she dropped the bread into the bucket and Marilyn lit a match. For a little while they watched the flame do its worst, until the stench of burned toast forced them back inside. The bucket remained out on the patio all day, blackened quarters disintegrated at the bottom.
Joanna was home for the sedarim so, of course, the task of setting the table fell to her. Wasn’t it a given for adult children to fall immediately back into their preordained roles within the family upon returning home? And look at that: “home”! Still, forever, she found herself referring to her parents’ house — a place she’d left decisively at seventeen — as home.
Once upon a time there had been no greater pleasure than in her imagined grownup responsibility of making the table “look pretty,” but she was a ripe thirty-one now, a ways away from eleven. And as she unpacked her grandma Bess’s ancient, precious Passover china from its musty foam crate, she smiled at the memory of her mother’s sly manipulation: It’s your job to make the table look pretty, Jo-Jo! Once upon a time she had relished the assignment. She would fuss about the precise angle and distance of the wine glass from plate and knife, feel betrayed when guests actually sat down to eat, messed up her perfect settings, ringed the crystal with lipstick.
After a couple of rocky periods in her twenties (a few particularly bad breakups, a pinch of credit card debt, unceremonious abandonment of a master’s in painting, enforced leaving — okay, so she was fucking her boss — of a plum graphic design job, bridges thoroughly charred), Joanna seemed now to have her “shit” more or less “together,” as they say, and her proficiency in making the table look pretty seemed proof enough. She set each plate so that the stem of its centered red poppy extended downward. This, she recalled from Marilyn’s formative instruction, was an important detaiclass="underline" gravity applied in the aesthetic of fine china. She cared considerably less these days about place-setting precision, but she would not betray the girl she had been. Evenly spaced flatware was the other crucial thing.