Life Among The Waksbergs
David Guetta is the worst, and other observations from a loud crowded nightclub in San Juan: I’m glad everyone else here is having a good time, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how. I find this all phenomenally depressing, in the boring kind of way that everything’s depressing if you think about it long enough, and if it’s late enough, and if you’re tired enough, and if you’re drunk enough, and if you’re me enough. I can hypothetically imagine the appeal of going to a loud discotheque like this in the city where you live, on the off chance that you’ll meet someone, fall in love, and start a family. But dancing and flirting with a bunch of strangers that you’ll never see again in your life? What’s the point?
I’m in Puerto Rico with the extended Waksberg clan — there are twelve of us total and it’s 2:44 AM and that horrible “Like a G6” song that no one in the history of the universe has ever listened to and said “You know what? I like this song” about is playing. Alex, our youngest, is a freshman in college now, which means all the kids are grown up now, which means we can all go to a nightclub together after the parents and grandparents go to bed, which means I can sit on a couch in said nightclub and hold my little sister’s purse while she grinds with a stranger and also my cousin’s purse while a stranger buys her a drink and I must be doing a pretty good job of holding these purses because some other girl comes up to me and asks if I’ll hold her purse too, and I say, “Sure, I’m the purse guy.” And then she blows me a kiss and wanders off with her boyfriend.
I’ve been told the music playing right now is Drake, and that he’s Jewish. It’s Hannukah and I am spending the holiday with my family. There have been five all-Waksberg vacations like this one, usually timed to coincide with my grandparents’ anniversary, which is Christmas. “But Grandma, didn’t that mean your non-Jewish friends couldn’t come to your wedding?” “We didn’t have any non-Jewish friends.”
I get that dancing is fun and that I forego my right to complain when I refuse to meet this club halfway — I imagine how stupid I must look sitting by myself, holding three purses, pretending to be reading something terribly important on my iPhone — but I’m tired and I’d like to go, and a few songs later, once I’ve wrestled support for my bill from the majority of our party, I find my cousin at the bar and she’s exchanging phone numbers with some guy and I lean in and I say, “It’s time to go.” And we go.
I’m in much higher spirits the next day. We’re sitting by the pool, which is more my speed, and our grandmother is telling us the story of how she and Grandpa got engaged. “We were at the zoo on Yom Kippur, eating hot dogs—” The grandchildren find this detail hilarious and she blushes. “Don’t tell anyone we were eating hot dogs on Yom Kippur!” This is also hilarious, because who are we going to tell, the Rabbi? She continues: “And Grandpa said, ‘What do you think we should do for New Year’s?’ And I knew that his parents got married on Christmas, so I said, ‘Why don’t we get married on Christmas and New Year’s can be our honeymoon?’” We all turn to Grandpa. “And what did you say?” “I said, ‘That sounds swell.’” They had been dating for less than a year.
Now our grandparents want two things, they say. They want to make it to their 60th wedding anniversary (this is their 58th) and they would like a great-grandchild. In fact, Grandma has already knitted six baby blankets, one for each of our hypothetical first born children. She’s ready. We are not so ready. I am the oldest grandchild but I am nowhere near ready to procreate, even though I am now at the age my parents were when I was born, which is a strange thing to think about and an even stranger thing to actually be true. I can’t even commit to putting nails in my bedroom wall, let alone a woman, let alone a child.
Things have not been great for me these last few years, monogamy-wise, and that’s all I’ll say about that. Sometimes I wonder if there’s anybody I’ve loved that I didn’t end up not loving, and if there will ever be someone that I love that I won’t end up not loving, and that if anyone at all is really up to this task. When you throw the promise of exclusivity on top of that, and the idea of marriage on top of that, it all seems so silly. If fifty percent of marriages fail, that means the institution of marriage is getting an F, and yet people keep doing it, like lemmings, throwing themselves off an increasingly mixed metaphor. A wedding seems like such a farce to me, because how could you know? When you promise to love someone forever, you’re not really promising, you’re guessing. Maybe that’s why people say “I do,” and not “I always will.”
My high school girlfriend now says I’m “unromantic” after I spell out my views on monogamy and marriage for her at a diner one night in Los Angeles. I bristle at this accusation, because in my mind, getting married is the opposite of romantic. You’re taking this relationship that’s special and individual to you, and shoving it into this constricting box that’s been around forever, that has nothing to do with you or your joint history or the love you’ve built together. Me, unromantic? I remind my ex-girlfriend of all the love letters and poems I wrote her in high school, of the time I scrawled “I LOVE JULIE” in giant letters in chalk on the street in front of her parents’ house in the middle of the night, and how the writing stayed there for months, holding out against several rainstorms before finally washing away. “Yeah,” she shrugs, “you used to be romantic. I don’t know what happened.”
Of all the Waksberg big group getaways this has been my favorite. In the past, as the oldest child, I was always either the only person in high school, or the only person in college, or the only person a couple years out of college, and long days of family togetherness were punctuated by moments of intense loneliness. I was a teenager, and nobody could possibly understand my exquisite isolation. But now we’re all adults and, with the exception of our night at the dance club, I don’t feel isolated at all. We pair up for kayaking in the bioluminescent bay and we laugh when we get stuck behind a bickering teenage boy and his mother. “Matthew, paddle right! Right!” “I am paddling right, Mom!” “No, your other right.” “Mom! my thing is stuck on a thing! What do you want me to do?!” “Matthew, try—” “I’m trying, Mom!” We take turns doing our Matthew/mom impressions later. Grandma thinks it’s hilarious.
I ask my cousin if she thinks she’ll see that boy again, the one she met at the club. She shrugs. “Maybe. He wasn’t that interesting but he also wasn’t horrible which puts him in the top bracket of boys I meet.” “Yeah?” I ask. “He didn’t say anything too stupid or offensive?” She thinks for a second. “Not too stupid, but I’m sure if I go out with him again, he will. Most do.”
We say our goodbyes in a gift shop on the way to the airport. Our grandmother cries, which spooks my little sister. “She was so sad,” she says later. “It felt like she was saying goodbye for the last time, like she knew something I didn’t.” Dad shakes his head. “She’s not sad, she’s emotional. She feels blessed.” He’s right, but Grandma also never takes anything for granted. Make plans for Thanksgiving and she’ll add, “…if I live that long.” During one visit, a couple years ago, I find out Mrs. Waksberg is teaching her husband how to cook. “I’m teaching him how to make meals for himself, because one day he’ll need to.” It’s morbid, but sadly practical. Grandma’s assumption is that she’ll die first, because the alternative is too horrific for her to think about. I suppose the best case scenario is the two die at the same time, peacefully in their sleep, after dancing at the weddings of all six of their grandchildren and visiting them in the hospital to meet their babies. It’s impossible to imagine one Waksberg without the other — she even goes with him to get his haircuts — and they never use a first person singular pronoun. “What did you do this weekend?” “We saw a movie.” “What did you think?” “We liked it.” “What did you think?” “Well, it was a little long, but we liked it.”
Grandma’s mother didn’t live long enough to meet her own great-grandchildren; she died a few months before I was born. Grandma loves telling the story of coming to California to meet the baby me, how it was the first time she was happy since the death of her mother, the woman I was named after. She was overflowing with joy. A friend commented, “Mrs. Waksberg, your heart is so full of love for this grandson, how are you going to make room when your other grandchildren are born?” And she said, “My heart will expand.” And she was right.
The night of the 25th, we meet in the senior Waksbergs’ ocean view suite before dinner for cocktails and toasts and lighting of the menorah. We present the anniversary couple with a card, signed by all of us, and the grandchildren perform a song we wrote, a reenactment of our grandparents’ engagement, sung to the tune of “America” from West Side Story.
BOYS: New Year’s is coming, what to do?
GIRLS: How ‘bout I get married to you?
BOYS: We can get married on Christmas…
GIRLS: No goyishe friends who will miss this.
Mrs. Waksberg wants to make a speech, and Dad and Aunt Judy pull out their cameras. “We’ve been married for 58 years,” she says, “and still every night before we go to sleep, he tells me he loves me.” There’s not a dry eye in the house.
On the flight from L.A. to Charlotte, where we’ll connect to San Juan, Harry and I sit next to Heather, a chatty handbag and jewelry designer flying home for Christmas. Heather is an expert at air travel: she’s small enough that she can sit by the window and nimbly climb over our sleeping bodies when she has to go to the bathroom, and she’s good at making light conversation with strangers. “Did you hear? They legalized horse meat — isn’t that barbaric?” she asks as she slips her self-designed snakeskin pocketbook into her self-designed real leather purse. At one point, religion comes up, and Heather tells us scientists are close to finding the God particle, the force inside atoms that make the electrons do their something— I can’t follow what she’s saying, the whole premise is so ludicrous to me, but it does remind me of one of my favorite Tennessee Williams lines. It’s in Scene Six of A Streetcar Named Desire. At the end of a bad date, Blanche makes a tearful confession to Mitch about a boy she destroyed. At the end of her story, Mitch moves in to kiss her and Blanche says, through sobs, “Sometimes — there’s God — so quickly!”
I love that line, although I don’t a hundred percent know why. Sometimes, so quickly, there’s God. I’m not sure I understand it, not fully. But I want to believe it.
