Clearly all three died of excruciating boredom.
Yit’kadal v’yit’kadash. Requiescat in pace. Th-th-that’s all, folks.
We’ve been thinking about our eulogies lately because this is not only our memoir, it’s also our suicide note. It’s true: we’ve set the date at last. Midnight, December 31, 1999. New Year’s Eve.
We’ve always known we’d die by our own hands sooner or later. Sooner has now come a-knocking.
“Six months to a year.” That’s what Vee’s doctor said.
We talked it over at dinner. We slept on it that night. The next morning we made a pact. All for one and one for all. If one of us goes, all of us go. Everybody out of the pool.
We have a joke. Well, not a joke. A riddle:
Q: How do three sisters write a single suicide note?
A: The same way a porcupine makes love: carefully.
Also, tenderly and slowly and by pressing on even when it hurts.
We also have a chart. A week or so after our mother died, Delph, who was then eighteen, drew it up. She made it pretty and tacked it onto the back of her bedroom door, where some girls hang pictures of teen idols. There it remains, our great-grandfather, the curse’s catalyst, near the top, and our mother, the hapless Dahlie, down at the bottom, bearing his weight and the weight of all the others who went before her.
We like the chart. We like the tidiness of the rows and columns. We like the repetitions and subtle variations. We’re fascinated by the emergent narrative.
It’s said that descendants of suicides view life as forever chaotic, but when we look at this chart, we see the opposite of chaos. We see order and routine. We see soothing predictability and reassuring inevitability.
Without the rows and columns, all you’d have is a crazy game of Clue. Great-Grandma Iris in the garden with a gun. Aunt Violet in the bedroom with a plastic bag. Mom in the river with rocks in her socks.
But with the rows and columns, you have our family tree. Every family’s got one. This one is ours.
CHAPTER 2
While all three of us have previously contemplated suicide, only Lady has given it a serious go. Several serious goes, as a matter of fact, and the first one took place almost twenty-three years ago, the long Fourth of July weekend of 1976.
Times were fraught. Over the previous twelve months New York City had been through stagflation and gas lines and “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” while we’d been through Vee’s first bout of cancer, plus our mother’s swan dive into the Hudson, plus Lady’s swan song for her five-year marriage to the egregious Joe Hopper, an ill-conceived enterprise that had not only caused her unhappiness but also forced her to go by the name Lady Hopper, which, she maintained, sounded like something you’d call a cartoon frog wearing pearls and a diadem. It didn’t help to use her given name, either. Lily Hopper was even worse: same frog, less jewelry.
We tried to look on the bright side. No more Joe Hopper, for one. No more Richard Nixon, for two. Vee had been cured. (That’s what her doctor had said. That’s the word he used. Cured.) And now it was the Bicentennial, a three-day weekend when incensed New Yorkers took time out from their calls for Ford’s impeachment to cheer the whistling comets and fiery chrysanthemums bursting above the World Trade Center.
Oh, that summer. Delph, nineteen, had a scholarship to Barnard, the women’s college just a few blocks uptown that all three of us attended, though only Vee and Delph graduated. Vee and her husband, the faultless Eddie Glod, were living in Vee’s bedroom. They were both twenty-three. Eddie worked several part-time, dead-end jobs while trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Vee had begun her job as a paralegal. She’d bought two used business suits at a thrift shop, along with one clunky pair of broken-in, broken-down heels. Only her several pairs of pantyhose were new, packaged for reasons we will never understand inside large plastic eggs.
She enjoyed her job. Each will she prepared was like an allegory, where this everyman called Testator gives away his house and his furniture, his cars and his cash until there’s nothing left but his kids. He takes a deep breath and gives them away, too, hands them over to some guardian who will never love them like he does. Now bereft of all he’s ever held dear, he signs his name and admits it at last: he’s going to die. Vee found the whole process romantic and literary. Also, there was medical and dental and a fully vested retirement plan.
As for Lady, in 1976, she was twenty-six and living alone on Amsterdam Avenue in the slummy fifth-floor walk-up she’d once shared with Joe. The weekend she decided to kill herself, she was nearing the end of a ten-day vacation that had been neither her idea nor her desire. It was the dentist she worked for who’d suddenly decided to take some time off and shut the place down. “Spontaneity is the word of the day,” the dentist had said, a line he’d clearly rehearsed.
The hygienist had been thrilled, but not Lady. She was the one who had to call the patients, reschedule appointments. “Something’s come up,” she had to say. “An emergency,” she’d add if a patient got testy. Or, if a patient grew concerned, “A less-than-dire emergency.”
The patients weren’t really the problem, though. The problem was that she didn’t know what to do with a vacation. Ten days. New York in late June, early July. It wasn’t as though she had a little place in the Hamptons.
“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” she asked the dentist after the hygienist had left for the day. She’d been working for him for four years by then, ever since she dropped out of school to marry Joe. It had been a wretched idea — the marriage, not the job. The job she liked. Office manager slash receptionist was not the sort of occupation Barnard wished for its girls, which, bewilderingly, was how that self-proclaimed bastion of second-wave feminism referred to its students, but Lady was as aspirational when it came to career as she’d been when it came to finding a life partner — that is, not very. She’d married Joe because he’d trusted her with his deepest darkest secret, a secret that had caused him such shame he’d bitten his lower lip as he revealed it, until a few discreet drops of blood dribbled into his Frank Zappa — esque lip beard. He wasn’t aware that he’d nibbled himself bloody, that’s how wrapped up he’d been in confessing this secret — and stoned, he’d also been extremely stoned — but Lady had seen the self-inflicted cut in his trembling lip, and it had touched her heart. Such a vulnerable boy behind the layers of sarcasm and arrogance, and of all the women he knew, he’d unburdened himself to her. How could she resist? She didn’t even mind that he was unemployed. He had a higher calling: he was working away on his master’s, after which he’d be getting a PhD in literature. Then a professorship somewhere Ivy Leaguish. His area of specialty was Victorian female poets. How could Lady not support this? He was a feminist! He wanted women artists to take their rightful place in the academy! They’d tied the knot in Central Park, and she’d willingly left school and taken the first job that allowed her to cover the rent on the apartment they were already sharing.
Joe Hopper, lanky and hairy, with a penchant for fringed suede vests over bare skin. He disliked Lady’s job, found it personally humiliating. Dentistry. It was so bougie, he said, so middle class. Even a minimum-wage job would have been better. The store on 112th that sold cheap sundresses and paper parasols was hiring. Ta-Kome always needed someone to make sandwiches. Or, if it was all about money, then what about waitressing at some Midtown dance club where lawyers and bankers tipped beaucoup? She said that she preferred the receptionist job — she liked getting to sit down all day — and reminded him about the benefits and free fillings. Their dental was even better than Vee’s, she said. Why didn’t he just lie to his friends about what she did, if he was so embarrassed by it? She wouldn’t care if he made up a story. “Tell them I man the ovens at Ray’s Pizza,” she said. “Tell them I drive a cab in the Bronx.” She’d go along with it, she assured him. She’d lie too.