LOOKING AT SHEILA by Andrew D. Cohen
My aunt Sheila used to say that by the time she was fifteen years old she’d been laid, re-laid and par-laid. “It’s true,” she’d say, coughing over her wild, wheezy laughter. “I was the girl on the block that no one’s mother wanted them to play with.” Back then, with her thick makeup, her false eyelashes, her fake nails, her wild hair and gold necklaces and sleek, designer knock-offs – back then, before all the tragedies of her life had taken shape – she was like this one-woman-talk-show with no commercial breaks. She’d sit in our little kitchen, smoking a cigarette, probably stoned, eating whatever she could get her hands on, sipping a glass of Manischevitz though there wasn’t a holiday in sight, and hold court: doling out unsolicited advice (“If they want dinner?” she’d say to my mother, slaving over the oven. “I tell them to call in a pizza, and that’s that.”); formulating and reformulating her philosophy of life (“What can I say? I am who I am. Take it or leave it.”); offering up delusional if kind-hearted assessments of everyone around her (“I bet all the girls are after you,” she’d say to me, which was complete bullshit.); but mostly bragging – about my uncle (“Not a bad bone in his body.”), her women’s accessory counter in a shoe store in New Jersey (“They don’t come for my accessories. They come because I give them therapy. They come for me.”), her body (“Do I have the ass of a twenty-year-old?” she’d say, grabbing her behind. And when you agreed, because God knows she wouldn’t take no for an answer, she’d grab her breasts and say, “Tits ain’t bad either.”), her son Steven (“Show ’em your muscles,” she’d call to him. “Look at him, for God’s sakes. He should be in a magazine.”), even Audra, her severely autistic daughter (“My little genius.”). In truth, almost any moment presented Sheila with an opportunity to promote herself or her worldview (my lasting memory of Steven’s Bar Mitzvah is actually of Sheila going wild in the center of the dance floor), and she seemed no more capable of passing up an opportunity than she did of keeping her hands off a plate of food (“The only reason I work out is because I can’t stop eating,” she’d say, laughing over a mouthful).
Eventually, at some point, she’d grow quiet, munching whatever she was munching, staring across the room, and you’d wonder whether she’d somehow exhausted herself. “You know what,” she’d suddenly say, as though she were about to offer up one of life’s profound truths. “I should really write a book.”
“A book,” my uncle would say, walking into the kitchen to get more ice for his drink. “What do you know about books?” Then he’d look at me: “She never read a book in her life.”
Which would only crack Sheila up again. “It’s true,” she’d say, putting her hand back in the bowl of food. “But I’m smarter than most people.”
I’ll admit, there were plenty of times over the years when you wished Sheila would shut the fuck up and give us all a rest for five minutes. Especially as we got older, as she got older and the difference between who she claimed to be and who was standing in front of us became increasingly apparent, I remember thinking Sheila, get a grip on yourself, will you? You work in a shoestore, your son is a good-for-nothing, and your ass is, well, like a fifty-year-old’s. But Sheila always had this heartbreaking vulnerability about her, this profound sadness – as though right there beneath all that makeup and hairspray and gold lurked this small, fragile girl who would shatter into a million pieces if you even looked at her too hard. I think she knew it, too – that was why she was always talking: because it was safer to be watched than to be looked at.
It’s like this thing I once read about Muhammad Ali: the reason he talked so much before his fight with Sonny Liston wasn’t because he was convinced he could win but because he was terrified he couldn’t. That was Sheila: gearing up for the fight of her life.
At least that’s what I think now, though it’s possible I’m seeing who she was for everything she’d eventually become.
* * *
Oh, if you could hear her screams in that packed funeral parlor two days after Steven’s car skidded off the Jersey Turnpike. “Oh, God, no,” she cried, trying to push herself back out of the room when she caught sight of the casket. “Please. Don’t make me do it.”
I’ve never heard such a raw expression of pain in my life.
And it only got worse when my uncle had to basically wrestle her into a pew, where she fell against him, heaving and wailing while the rabbi stumbled to make sense out of the senseless death of her thirty-four-year-old son, knowing as we all did how much she had adored Steven, how much hope she’d invested in his future – how in that casket lay every possibility she’d ever have of seeing one of her children marry, of having grandchildren, of resting assured that when she died someone would be there to look after sweet, oblivious Audra who was undoubtedly sitting just then in her bedroom, rocking back and forth and listening to her Walkman.
To see her so unhinged, so ravaged, was simply terrifying.
Especially awful, cruel even, was having it all go down in front of all those well-heeled garmentos and Mafiosos with whom my uncle worked in the Garment District and with whom she had spent a lifetime cultivating this larger-than-life image of herself; to be so vulnerable, so publicly exposed – I mean, you just knew it had to be killing her.
Not that she could have done anything about it. Not then, anyway. But let’s just say I wasn’t surprised when, afterwards, back at the house for the shiva, in between thanking and hugging people who’d come to express their condolences, I heard her hiss to my mother, “All these fucking people and their pity,” as though she hated it with every fiber of her being.
* * *
Nor was I surprised when, in the aftermath of the funeral, she displayed a fierce determination to never leave herself so exposed again. No doubt she would have preferred to vanish altogether (and, in truth, she didn’t venture out that much), but she also seemed to sense that if she didn’t “appear” now and then, she risked inviting even more of the pity she detested. To this end she put on her makeup, her fake eyelashes, her gold necklaces and schlepped herself across the country to my wedding the following August (“Believe me, it was the last thing I wanted to do,” she said to me afterwards.), and a few weeks after that she stood dutifully beside my uncle greeting customers during the opening of the store he’d planned to run with his dead son, and a few months later she attended my sister’s wedding. Sometimes, when she was feeling up to it, she even tried to chat or joke or dole out some advice – as though she were attempting somehow to re-inhabit the role she’d always played.
But if looking at her in the past had been difficult, now it became almost unbearable. Whereas my uncle, who, even if he rarely spoke about his feelings, remained as soft and approachable as always, Sheila developed this hard, furious shell that brought to mind a combustible pin-cushion. Even a fairly neutral question like, “How are you holding up?” would be met with a forced smile and a “Great, how are you?” that sounded more like “go fuck yourself.” And if you actually mentioned Steven’s death, she looked like she might outright throttle you.
In this light, you can imagine how uneasy I felt that winter, some ten months after Steven’s death, while visiting with her at my uncle’s store; I hardly knew where to look. Though she did her best to chat us up, asking about married life, life in the West, plans for children; though we tried to make it as easy on her as possible, avoiding any subject that was remotely provocative, the whole thing seemed so forced and unpleasant that it came as a genuine relief when she broke down and started sobbing. “For God’s sakes,” she whispered, grabbing her face, though when we tried to console her she abruptly shook us off.
“You know the worst part about it?” she said, wiping her eyes. “It’s the way people look at you.” And then she added with pure venom: “Like you’re less than them.”
Which may explain why, after that, for a while anyway, I stopped looking entirely.
* * *
The thing is, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Though I hardly saw or even spoke to her, though I lived all the way across the country, I was keenly aware of her presence, the weight of her grief. At night I’d have these wild, vivid dreams in which Sheila would be crying and I’d be crying, and we’d be talking about Steven, or sometimes even to Steven, after which I’d awake exhausted and disoriented, feeling as though I’d actually been with her. And the image of her at the funeral, the cries of her voice, would spring to mind during odd moments of the day. Every week or two I’d talk to my uncle, about my job, his business – nothing at all. And I suppose I could have done the same with Sheila; I wanted to. But, though I knew she was close by, resting or sitting on the couch next to Audra watching television, I somehow couldn’t bring myself to ask to speak with her. Partly, I suspect, I was afraid of unleashing that fury. But more than that, I just didn’t want to expose her.
I felt acutely sensitive to the ways that my life seemed to be expanding in ways almost inversely proportional to hers. And each new milestone – new house, new dog, new job, my wife’s pregnancy – found me worrying about how and if to tell her. On the one hand, I didn’t want to make her feel any worse than she did. But I also didn’t want to make her feel pitied by avoiding her outright. Instead, I’d try to strike some balance between the two, telling her the news but in as understated a way as possible. “Congratulations – that’s wonderful news,” she’d say with that forced, angry cheer that made it clear how badly I’d failed.
If only I could convey to her how much I cared! At one point I wrote a letter telling her as much. But the effort seemed inadequate, pathetic even, in the face of her anguish, and one day I got it into my head to call her up and promise to look after Audra in the event anything happened to Sheila and my uncle.
Even before I could get the words out, however, she burst into tears. “Oh, God,” she cried, handing the phone to my uncle. “I can’t talk about this.”
It was as though she’d been laid bare all over again.
* * *
I don’t think you ever recover from a tragedy like this. I mean, maybe if you have some deep faith in God, or a bunch of other kids and grandkids running around, or you get hooked in with some incredible support group – maybe, over time, you can start to contextualize the anguish, put words around it so as to help take off some of the edge. But mostly I think you just keep moving, taking care of what you need to, trying your best to live what looks from the outside, anyway, like a functional, normal life, while privately tending that awful knot of grief that is yours and yours alone. And that’s more or less what Sheila did.
The year after Steven died she started going into work again. She got back on the treadmill and started a new diet and began the unenviable task of cleaning out the old house, not just Steven’s stuff, but everything, so they could put it on the market and move to the small condo they owned on the Shore. Sometimes she met friends for dinner or briefly got on the phone to ask about our infant son or laugh with my wife about motherhood. And every now and then she showed up at a celebration, a Bar Mitzvah or wedding, had a glass of wine, and danced.
In short, she put on her face and started to face the world again.
She did it pretty convincingly too, talking and smoking cigarettes, offering up unsolicited opinions, occasionally cracking herself up. Sometimes she even tried to parlay the tragedy of Steven’s death into the old narrative of her life (“I really should write a book,” she’d say. “I mean, when you think about it, I’ve led a remarkable life: my parents died when I was a kid. I’ve lost a son. I raised an autistic daughter. I started my own business. . . .”).
Those of us who knew her could, of course, see how the loss had irrevocably transformed her; how her world, her possibilities, had dramatically shrunken; how painful it was for her to watch her friends enjoy their grandchildren. But she was trying, doing her share, more than a lot of people might have done.
So when she got cancer two years later, it felt like a real kick in the gut.
* * *
She got it bad, too – in her uterus, her ovaries, her kidney. It was awful. Not that she wanted my pity. In fact, when I finally mustered the nerve to call, she cut me off at the pass. “Andrew,” she said, abruptly, “I’ll do what I have to do and that will be that.”
A few days later they took out her uterus, her ovaries, stripped out God knows how many lymph nodes, and a few weeks after that she started chemotherapy, which promptly did away with her wild hair, her appetite, and whatever get-up-and-go had managed to survive Steven’s death. Every few days I’d call my uncle to see how she was doing, and he’d tell me she was resting or watching Lifetime, that she was tolerating the treatment reasonably well. And on those occasions I spoke with her, she offered up the same bravado she had at the outset.
Increasingly, however, you sensed it was knocking the shit out of her.
But, whereas after the initial shock of Steven’s death she’d been able to at least dress the part, now there was really no hiding it. And maybe because of this, save for a little makeup and a wig, she sort of stopped trying. Indeed, when I saw her a few months later, there was something remarkably undefended about her, not just in her physical appearance, but in the way she carried herself. Sure, there were flashes of the old, raucous Sheila; sure, she occasionally recycled some of her old lines (“She’s so smart, my daughter,” she said one evening, telling us how whenever she left her alone in the house, Audra would un-tape and re-tape the boxes of cookies that Sheila had hidden away, so Sheila wouldn’t notice she’d eaten them.). But mostly she seemed too tired, too depleted to put on the performances she always had; instead she seemed more or less content to sit there listening and talking about parenthood, kids, Steven, the weather.
At one point during the evening she even reached up and took off her wig. And I remember how she shrugged and looked at me, obviously a little self-conscious – bald, ordinary, utterly exposed. “I’ll tell you, Sheila,” I said, looking right at her. “You wear it very well.”
And I meant it.
* * *
I don’t think any of us thought anything was “over” when we learned six months later that the chemotherapy had worked: As my uncle put it, once something like this happens, you’re always looking over your shoulder. What is more, the treatment had pretty much ravaged her – she was exhausted, her immune system was completely shot – and she was going to need a new hip if she hoped to ever walk normally again.
Which is to say nothing about her dead son.
But when six months passed and she made it through hip surgery, and another six months went by and there were still no signs of relapse, we were beginning to think that maybe she’d beaten it. And as she slowly went about stitching together the tatters of her life, putting on her makeup, returning to work, getting back on the treadmill, starting a new diet, there was a growing sense that she’d stared down the dragon and lived to tell the tale.
So when we learned in the fall that they’d found another tumor in her kidney, we were simply devastated.
After everything she’d been through! After all the heartache and suffering! It seemed so cruel, so unfair – so pointless. And I remember briefly wondering whether she shouldn’t just give up and let the cancer devour her.
What can I say? I felt hopeless.
The thing is, Sheila didn’t give up. Not when she started another round of chemo; not when she lost the hair that had hardly grown back in the first place; not when, after three months of treatment, her numbers didn’t move, or when, after six months, the tumor still hadn’t shrunk; not when the doctors changed course and tried her on a vigorous course of radiation or when the tumor started causing problems that required the insertion of a stent in her kidney.
If anything, she seemed to grow stronger, fiercer – getting Audra to her workshop each morning and leaving her detailed notes for what she could and couldn’t eat when she returned in the afternoon; going in for her treatments and to work afterwards to check on her store; getting on the treadmill every evening to walk her six miles. “I don’t know how she does it,” said my uncle, amazed. On those occasions when she did stop to chat – because, in truth, she was hardly talking now – there was this intensity to what she said. (“I’ll kill ’em,” she said, one evening when I shared with her that my sons wanted to have a cookie-eating contest with her, and I realized that on some level she meant it.)
It was almost as though surviving calamities had become a way of life for her, as though she’d been stripped so bare that all that remained was this tough core of determination.
And maybe because of this – because it was all so essential, so unadorned – there was, amidst all the tragedy and heartbreak, something life affirming, even inspiring.
Even when, in the middle of her treatments, my uncle was diagnosed with colon cancer, she didn’t blink. “You know what she tells me?” my uncle said to me, having just betrayed how terrified he is. “I got through it, and you will too.”
And you could tell that he sort of believed her.
* * *
I think it’s safe to say that when we learned first, that my uncle’s surgery was successful, and then, a few weeks later, that Sheila’s PET Scan was clean, there was a collective sigh of relief, even a sense of elation, that it – whatever “it” was – was finally over. The last decade had been a more or less harrowing one for my aunt and uncle, and while calamity could always strike again – while it was statistically likely that at least one of them would relapse – you got the sense they’d been through the worst of it.
And even if they hadn’t, they were almost seventy now, the age when bad shit was supposed to start happening, so what, really, was there to fear? Indeed, the unpleasantries that would presumably define their remaining years – the blood tests, the PET Scans, the nagging worries about Audra, the ghost of their dead son, the trials and tribulations of old age – could almost seem like a welcome reprieve.
It could be worse. It had been worse.
And it wasn’t just me: they seemed to feel like they’d lived out their great dramas, run the gauntlet and survived. Occasionally they even referred to their lives in the past tense. So when my uncle calls me a couple of months after his surgery to say he has some crazy shit to tell me, I don’t think much of it. “Crazy shit?” I ask, still riding high from their good news. “What kind of crazy shit?”
“So, well, I never told you this,” he says, like he’s trying to figure out how to put it. “But Sheila actually had a baby before we got married.”
“A what?”
“Yeah,” he says, laughing uneasily. “Some guy she hardly knew.”
And suddenly I remember her old line about being laid, re-laid and par-laid.
“This was back in the early 1960s,” says my uncle, explaining that even if the whole thing hadn’t been taboo, Sheila’s family could hardly pay their phone bills let alone pay for another child. So her mother sent her to Florida to a home for young, pregnant Jewish girls. “They didn’t even tell her father,” my uncle says, telling him instead that she was going to reform school for six months.
As it turned out, the girl was adopted by a Jewish couple on Long Island, and a few weeks ago, some fifty years after the fact, the girl – the woman – decided she wanted to find her birth mother.
“Are you kidding me?” I say, though somehow I’m shocked and not shocked at the same time.
“I’m telling you,” my uncle says, like he can’t believe it himself.
As he tells me about the woman, a social worker who lives with her husband on Long Island; how she has two kids in college; how she and Sheila talked for hours; how they totally hit it off; how she really wants Sheila to be part of her life; I feel a surge of joy, a release from a burden I hadn’t even realized I was carrying. “Sheila’s got grandchildren,” I say to no one in particular. “Audra’s got a sister.”
“It’s like some kind of Lifetime special,” my uncle says, and I have to agree. “I mean, you gotta see these pictures she sent us. She looks exactly like Sheila. She even talks like her!”
“Did you ever wonder about her?” I say, still trying to grab hold of this news. “Did you ever talk about contacting her?”
“Sometimes,” my uncle tells me. “You know, once Steven died we knew we wouldn’t have any grandchildren. But let’s put it this way: we wouldn’t have gone looking for her.”
“I really don’t know what to say, Sheila,” I say when she finally gets on the phone.
“Me neither,” she says. “I mean, I never expected this in a million years.” And then there’s a very long silence. “You know what she says to me? You know what she says to me – my daughter? She says, ‘I want to thank you for bringing me into the world because I’ve had a very good life.’ A very good life,” Sheila repeats, her voice cracking as she does. “Can you believe that?”
* * *
After reading a story like this, it’s tempting, maybe even unavoidable to draw some breezy conclusion, to roll out a cliched life lesson or tired aphorism about the importance of hope, the triumph of the human spirit, the mysterious ways of God; or maybe to try to frame the story in terms of some universal narrative, a heroine’s journey, perhaps, a classic tale of sin and redemption, some kind of feel-good movie or, well, Lifetime special; or, to simply decide that Sheila earned this good fortune, that after everything she’s been through she deserves it – all of which is rooted in our deep need to make sense of her suffering, to justify it, to be done with it once and for all. And I confess to having fallen prey to such nonsense more than once in the excitement of recent weeks.
Yet, undoubtedly, something profound has happened here. And I don’t mean in the abstract, or even in terms of the radical changes to Sheila’s daily life, filled as it suddenly is with phone calls with her grandkids and walks on the beach with her daughter. Nor am I talking about how differently others perceive her in light of what’s happened, though this cannot be overstated. No, I’m talking about who Sheila is, how she experiences her life, how she understands herself and the world around her.
It’s not like the old Sheila – or, maybe, the old Sheilas – are gone; it’s not like the grief-stricken, cancer-ravaged woman has suddenly vanished, or that she’s stopped talking about herself (“Don’t call me ‘aunt’ anymore, Andrew,” she shouted on the phone recently, “Call me ‘grandma’”!). And God knows she’s not putting on less make-up. But there’s something else there now, too, something bigger, broader, more spacious – as though, having had her entire sense of who she was and where she was heading suddenly up-ended, she’s still trying to catch up to the enormity of life itself.
You can sometimes hear it in her voice – a certain bewilderment, a disorientation, even a strange sort of joy. It’s like someone who, after years of being buried beneath a heap of rubble, can finally lift her head, blink her eyes, and look around.
And all she can do is marvel at what she sees: My daughter. My grandchildren. My life.
Andrew Cohen’s essays have appeared in The Missouri Review, Colorado Review, and The Saint Ann’s Review.