The Air in Here

Joyce Levinson Goldfarb is a widow for two days and twelve hours when everyone she’s known in her sixty-five years descends upon her house to declare how much they will miss her husband, Gary.

“Everyone?” Gary would have said. “Don’t exaggerate.”

But for once Gary isn’t here to correct Joyce as she sweats in the low chair brought in for sitting shiva. Nor is he here to teach her how to work the Godforsaken thermostat. She feels moisture at her temple when she tucks a strand of silver hair behind her ear and fumes at her late husband.

Gary kept her away from anything related to the air in the house. Now, in the position to make decisions about air control, what does Joyce know about humidifiers, air filters, and all the other air-related things Gary muttered about when the Minnesota seasons changed? She frantically pressed the down arrow at some point after the burial and before all these people arrived, but the number on the box stayed at seventy—the age Gary would have celebrated next month. She’d laugh if it weren’t devastating.

Jeremy touches her shoulder. “More water, Mom?”

“I’m fine, sweetheart. Thank you.”

“She’s mad at Dad,” Eric leans in to say to his older brother.

“You’re mad at Dad?” Jeremy says.

Sweat pooling in her armpits, she isn’t about to explain to her adult sons how their father promised to let her go first. She and Gary agreed he was the most equipped to adjust. He could hire a gardener and have his executive assistant sign him up for one of those meal delivery services. She’d considered one herself several times. Why is she always sautéing this and roasting that when some ambitious folks are doing the same thing and in the proper portions? All that’s held her back is the nuisance of monkeying around with yet another thing on her phone or computer. She’s at capacity for these apps that are supposed to make her life easier. Her daughter-in-law, Tali, Eric’s wife, has tried getting her to use one of those ride apps when she complains about wanting to see an author at the independent book shop in some far-flung neighborhood of St. Paul but doesn’t want to deal with the parking. She still can’t comprehend how it’s wise to get in a car with a stranger. “It’s safer than a cab,” Tali says, “because the app can track your ride.” Joyce refuses. She and her best friend, Margie, have always preferred to make their husbands take turns dropping them off and picking them up. And there’s also their mutual close friend, Nora Devine, a widow for a decade already, who doesn’t mind shlepping a car full of ladies around or dealing with the headache of street parking and meters. Nora, younger when her husband died, was less set in her ways. Or Vic’s ways, for that matter.

Joyce shakes her head. The car nonsense is the type of thinking Gary would not waste his time on if she’d gone first. He was a gifted parker. He pulled up some place, no matter how busy, and a space opened as if the universe had been waiting for his arrival.

She can feel Jeremy looking at her, concerned.

“I’m all right,” she says before he can ask. But is he okay? Is anyone other than her worried about how he’s doing since Nikki asked for time apart? In Joyce’s day if you wanted space from your husband, you joined a social club or got a job, especially if kids were involved. Not that Jeremy or Nikki want her opinion.

“You don’t have to be all right,” Jeremy says. “It’s normal to be off.”

She looks from Jeremy to Eric. “Be honest with me, boys. Did you fiddle with the thermostat in the dining room?”

The air is thick enough to cup between her fingers. Was she supposed to turn down the humidifier at night? Or turn it up? Gary probably programmed the air conditioning with a secret timer that won’t release a temperature lower than seventy until mid-June.

“It’s May,” he would have said. “Who needs air conditioning in May? In Minneapolis? At night?”

She senses Jeremy waiting for her to look him in the eye. “You think either of us would mess with the air in Dad’s house?”

“My house, too,” she says.

“You know what I mean.”

She loosens her black cardigan, trying to let a self-made breeze reach her skin. The symbolic torn garment of mourning flaps along with the cotton of her sweater.

“It’s just like Dad to leave me here wilting to death in front of our friends.”

“Mom” Eric says. “Come on.”

“What? He didn’t always consider how I wanted things. But today’s not the day to focus on that.”

She closes her eyes, the energy to talk to her sons or anyone else temporarily gone. She knows the air issue is a stand-in for all she’ll soon face. She wants to blame Gary, but it’s her own damn fault for living in the same house for over forty years without understanding how each part of it works, how their life works. She knows little about insurance, taxes, cars, or other areas a woman of sixty-five ought to have acquainted herself with by now. Sure, her sons will help her, or Margie and Nora, but Joyce knows she’ll first have to experience feeling lost in precisely the way she sometimes warns her daughters-in-law and nieces not to let happen to them. She’ll tell them again when she sees them pass through the living room, she decides. Not that this is the appropriate time for a lecture on financial and thermostat independence, but they are all so rarely in the same place these days, unless you count the family Facebook group her niece Kim created. Which Joyce does not.

“Can I tell you my favorite story about Gary?”

Joyce looks up and sees Frank Jones, who, Joyce gathers from the bits of conversation she caught, is a lawyer who played softball against Gary’s firm when they were in their thirties. Joyce is pleased with herself for remembering his name, even if she needed context clues for how she knows him.

“We were in the middle of a tournament,” Frank says, “and Mike Sutherland, one of our guys, gets hit in the head with a bat. Turns out Mike has a concussion, which is not something you want to hear when you’re responsible for billable hours.”

“For sure not,” Joyce says. She tries to sound charming, which the moment seems to call for, even in her time of grief. There are rarely moments in her life that don’t call for some charm. No matter the bad timing. She’s resented that truth in the past and she resents it even more now.

“It wasn’t Gary’s fault, but what does Gary do?” Frank waits. Or maybe his name is Phil Jones, not Frank. Joyce could never keep Gary’s acquaintances straight, even in their earliest years of marriage when her memory was sharper and she cared more about noting such things for her husband.

“I don’t know,” Joyce says when she realizes Frank/Phil expects an answer.

“He arranged for both of our teams to take turns hanging out at Mike’s house. It was impressive. It’s one thing to say you’re going to help and another to actually do it.”

“Sounds like Gary.” Joyce nods as if dismissing a meeting. She watches Frank/Phil make room for the next story of Gary’s generosity, of Gary’s willingness to help, of Gary’s inexplicable ability to juggle numerous favors for a variety of people. The details of that impossibility often falling to her.

“There was nobody like Gary,” the man next to Frank/Phil says. Carl, Joyce thinks. Or Kevin. She stifles the desire to blurt out anything less than flattering about Gary with these almost-strangers. As if the reminder of Gary’s all-too-human qualities will make her miss him any less.

What could she share anyway? Did you know Gary always rejected the first table at a restaurant more out of principle than any dissatisfaction? Did you know he had to exercise an hour a day or he was impossible to be around? It didn’t matter if it made us late or forced us to rearrange our plans. Did you know he didn’t speak to me for a week in 1977 when I lost the extra house key, but I wouldn’t admit it? She could go on, but it wouldn’t make others’ memories of Gary less accurate. He had a firm sense of the way people should help others. And while she mostly benefited from his sense of duty, she also felt the burden of his commitments.

Joyce wipes her eyes then feels Jeremy’s hand on her arm again. “If you need a break, everyone will understand.”

“I’m fine.”

“You can’t really be mad at Dad,” Jeremy says. “It’s not like he would have chosen this.”

“I can be mad at anyone I want to be mad at.”

She and Gary had a reasonable plan. She’d go first in her late 80s when he’d be in his early 90s. “You’ll be married in a year,” Joyce said any time they spoke about who would live the longest. “Engaged in six months. Married six months later. Tops.”

“Come on, if I go first, there will be men lined up to date you.”

“Right, because so many men want to date a woman of retirement age who hates to travel and spends all her spare time helping her grandkids get to soccer and bar mitzvah tutors because she can’t say no to her grown children.”

“Or reading. Don’t forget reading.”

“Right. Or reading. And who stopped coloring her hair a decade ago.”

“You only need one decent guy in that line, Joyce.”

Her memory is interrupted by Margie’s determined march towards her and the boys.

“What’s going on?” Joyce asks, recognizing the angry look in her friend’s face despite all the who-knows-what pumped in there that’s supposed to soften her expressions. Gary insisted Joyce not put that poison in her face, which seemed reasonable enough to Joyce at the time, but now she’s stuck looking her age while her contemporaries have that foggy fifty-five to seventy-five-year-old-it’s-anyone’s-guess face.

Margie turns to Eric, still sitting in the low chair next to Joyce. “I’d love to understand why we’re crammed in your mother’s living room instead of your synagogue’s social hall? Someone spilled lemonade in the hallway by the bathroom. And I’ve seen mud prints on the carpet.”

“I have a good carpet cleaner in the—”

“Tali already helped me,” Margie says. “But you don’t need this chaos right now.”

Joyce shrugs. “This is how we do it. You know that.”

“With Eric’s access to a huge space blocks away, couldn’t you use that building and make your life easier this week?”

“Shiva is traditionally in the home,” Jeremy says.

“Tradition or not, who in their right mind thinks it’s a good idea for a woman who lost her husband to have people traipsing dirt through her house?”

Eric says something under his breath Joyce can’t hear.

“What was that?” Jeremy asks.

“Just that it’s nice to hear you be the one invoking tradition for once.”

“Seriously?” Jeremy says. “You want to go there? Now?”

“Really not the time or place,” Joyce says. She stands but is quickly dizzy.

“Have you eaten anything today?” Margie asks, holding Joyce’s elbow.

“A little.” Joyce remembers a hardboiled egg after the burial. She leads Margie a few steps away from the boys.

“Don’t be too hard on them,” she says. “They’re under a lot of stress.” She isn’t sure why she’d kept the news of Eric’s work problems and Jeremy’s marital problems from Margie, but she certainly isn’t about to get into the details now.

“I was out of line,” Margie says. “I don’t need a reason to give your kids a break. I’m sorry.”

“For what it’s worth, they asked me if I felt comfortable having the shiva here. And I said yes.”

What she doesn’t tell Margie is that dealing with Jeremy and Eric is not too different from what it was like reasoning with Gary and even with Margie and Nora sometimes. It’s simpler to do things how they want, her passionate sons, her strong-willed husband, and her confident friends. She isn’t sure what it says about her that she surrounds herself with people who make it difficult to do anything other than their way—people who take up the air in the room.

“I get it,” Margie says in a way Joyce knows after more than fifty years of friendship means I was trying to help, but I will shut up.

“I better sit,” Joyce says.

Margie puts her arm around Joyce’s shoulders and leads her back to the chair, encouraging Joyce to let her take on the brunt of the small talk with anyone who walks over. Joyce agrees, stealing the time to look at the faces of the people from the center and edges of her life. They changed their plans for the evening to be there with her, and her sons, and her daughters-in-law, and her grandchildren to say Gary meant something to them, that she means something to them. And when these people are all gone for the night, she can crawl into bed without leaving the house. It isn’t the silliest tradition.

She looks up to tell Margie as much when she notices Nora talking to a man by the bookshelf who looks like Luis, the retired Latin American literature professor who recently joined their book club. It isn’t impossible Luis would come to pay his respects, but it’s certainly unexpected.

Joyce spoke to other members of the book club tonight, but Luis has only been in the group for two months. She hopes he doesn’t know how she argued against him joining at first. She worried the discussions would be beneath him considering his many years teaching at The University of Minnesota. Not to mention they rarely had a man in the group. But more to the point, as a long-retired high school English teacher, Joyce liked owning the role of “expert.” Now as she watched Nora remove a copy of Love in The Time of Cholera from the shelf and excitedly say something to Luis, presumably about the book, she’s glad she’d possessed the wherewithal not to spend too much time objecting.

“Who’s Nora Devine talking to?” Margie asks. “And by talking to, I mean flirting with.”

“You think she’s flirting?”

“You think she isn’t?”

Joyce feels happy for Nora. After ten years alone doesn’t Nora deserve a nice companion?

“Can you imagine such a thing?” Joyce says, her voice catching in her throat. “Going out on a date?” She isn’t crying. How could she manage any more tears today? But her voice must have conveyed grief and panic because Margie unilaterally decides to end the evening.

“It’s 9:00. Enough for one night,” Margie says. Let’s focus on getting you to sleep. And turning down the Goddamn heat. How do you stand it?”

“I can’t stand it. I’m suffocating. I’ve pressed every button. Nothing changes.”

Joyce sees Margie exchange a look with one of the women from Joyce’s mahjong group, the crew in charge for the night. The group members make themselves useful collecting empty cups and plates. Joyce is only the second in the group to lose a husband, but the ladies are long experienced in the rhythms of mourning. They’ve buried plenty of parents and some siblings and friends, too. In one case God forbid a thousand times over, a child. Joyce, like all of them, has mastered the tasks of meal arranger, contribution organizer, cup emptier, tray re-filler, and paper plate collector. It never matters which women in the group are Jewish and which are not. They are all shiva experts.

~

In the morning, Joyce and Margie wake up within minutes of each other, the sheet and thin blanket scrunched towards their ankles. Joyce can’t remember if she cried herself to sleep, or if Margie’s pills had made her semi-unconscious. All she knows is Margie promised to close up the house then fall asleep on Gary’s side so Joyce wouldn’t stay awake like she had the previous two nights panicking about the empty space.

“Gary’s ghost is trying take us with him,” Margie says.

Joyce sits up to show Margie the dark spots on the sheets from her damp skin. “What am I going to do?” She puts her head back on the pillow, sure she’ll never find the energy to fix the air or even fix herself a cup of coffee.

“We’re going to call someone who knows more about the air system than Gary did. He was not the only one capable of the job.”

“Are you sure?”

Margie sits up. “Honey, this we can do.”

“The thermostat is one item on a long list,” Joyce says. “Not that I’ve actually written one.”

“You will get to it all. Look at Nora. She’s never seemed better”

“She was fifty-five when Vic died. A spring chicken.”

“You’re not ninety. But you have a point.” Margie takes her phone off Gary’s nightstand. “I’m starting a list.”

“Item number one,” Joyce says, “Not suffocating in the house.”

“Yes, that’s obvious. What else.” Margie holds her pen up, ready to take orders.

“Sign me up for one of those meal delivery plans. Assuming I ever get my appetite back.”

“Got it. And you will. I say for today we add take a shower to this list. And that’s enough for now.”

Joyce nods and breaths deeply. “A shower I can do.”