The Ten Best Days of My Life (3 page)

uncle Morris is my grandmother's brother. He was her best friend and never got married because he felt he had to take care of my grandmother and her three sisters after my great-grandparents died.

“Did you know that I thought about you all the time?” I asked him, hugging him, smelling his usual cigar smoke and Life Savers Pep-O-Mint candies.

“Of course I did,” he said, taking me in his arms. “I even shaved for you. Remember how you wouldn't hug me when you were a little girl because my beard would scrape you?”

I did. I always remembered how his beard scratched my face. uncle Morris shaved his scratchy beard for me!

“Whenever I ate a Life Saver, I thought of you,” I cried to him.

I was literally bonkers with happiness at this point, but who cared? Everyone else around me was seeing their families for the first time and was bonkers too. I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Braunstein with her parents. She kept hugging them, then screaming, then crying, then hugging them again like she was five years old and just found them after being lost in an amusement park.

My grandfather nuzzled his arm around me as we walked out of Building Blissful, and my grandmother pulled my sweater back so it wasn't draping over my shoulder. I love that my grandmother did that. I love that I got to see her again and she could fix my sweater the way she wanted it to be and clean the hot fudge sundae smudge on my face with her saliva (okay, maybe I had a bite of Mrs. Braunstein's sundae). It's always the little things we take for granted, isn't it?

The strange thing about this whole “spirit and not a being” thing is that people still feel like people. We're not ghosts. You can't put your arm through someone like they do in the movies. My grandfather felt warm and alive. As I buried my head in his lapel, he smelled exactly the way I remembered him: Old Spice, the pomade from his hair. My grandmother's saliva felt like saliva. How are we all so real if we're dead? Why doesn't anyone on earth know about this? (Yet they know about the pearly gates and angels. Who gave that away?) This is what was going through my head as we piled into my grandmother's old lemon-colored Cadillac Coupe deVille with the dirty plastic flower hanging off the antenna. “It's so I can find it in a parking lot,” she had told me when I was little.

“Why do you still have this?” I asked, jumping into the backseat with uncle Morris.

“It still has a few good miles in it,” she said, revving up the gas. “You know how I always loved this car.”

She really did. I was just surprised that in all these years she never got a new one.

“I love this car,” she said again, backing out of Building Blissful's parking lot. “Remember, honey, it's heaven. You get what you want.”

I wondered if there were Porsche dealerships up here.

“What's the deal with money up here?” I asked them.

“Don't have it,” uncle Morris told me. “Everything just appears. We worked hard enough on earth. In heaven you get everything your soul desires.”

Freaky, yet true, because when we pulled up to a house, after my grandparents fought over the directions (some things never change), it was a split-colonial farmhouse with a small creek in front. I knew that house very well. It took me a second, but then I remembered.

“Wait, that's Len Jacobs's house,” I said out loud.

Len Jacobs was a kid I grew up with outside Philadelphia. I wasn't crazy about Len. We weren't friends; he was in a totally different group in high school. Len was that guy in the eighties who got really into the punk scene and shaved his head into a Mohawk. Len always wore an army jacket with big clunky leather boots with chains dangling off the heels. You could hear him coming down the hall.

Anyway, I used to see this split-colonial farmhouse every day from the bus as we were going to school. I loved that house and I always wondered who lived in it. I grew up in an ultramodern home that my parents were nuts about keeping spotless and clean; it was never comfortable. There were no comfy pillows, and you always had to take off your shoes so you didn't scuff the floors. Every time I saw this farmhouse with the creek going through the lawn and the rock bridge in the center of the walkway leading up to the house, it looked like a place where you'd want to kick off your shoes because the dress code was pajamas and slippers.

Then one day in high school, I don't remember why, I was in a car with Len Jacobs. Someone was driving us home after school, which was weird. I can't remember who it was or why we were together, but that's not the point. The point is that the farmhouse turned out to be Len Jacobs's house. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the house I always wanted was punk-fanatic Len Jacobs's house. Even years later, when I'd come home to visit my family in Philadelphia, whenever I drove by that house, I wondered if Len Jacobs's family still lived there and if they appreciated the house. It was in need of a paint job, and I noticed that some of the rocks had fallen from the bridge. I remember being really sad about that and wished that I could buy it and fix it up to the way it was when I was a kid. I don't think I ever mentioned to anyone that I always loved that house. Still, I never forgot it, and here it was and it was repainted and the creek was flowing and the rock bridge had been built back up.

“That's Len Jacobs's house!” I said again, looking at my family perplexed.

“It's yours now,” they told me. “Boy, you had big dreams.”

“What do you mean it's mine?”

“This was what you dreamed of having. This is what you got,” my grandmother said matter-of-factly.

How weird is that?

My grandmother pulled the car into the driveway, and we all got out.

“So wait, this is really all mine?” I asked, taking a step back and looking at the house in full view.

“It is!” my grandmother said.

All mine! Len Jacobs's house was mine? How did they get it up here? How did they know? Do I just go in?

“It's your house, sweetheart,” my uncle Morris repeated, clearly seeing the disbelief that was still plastered across my face.

“Do I need keys?” I asked. “Is there an alarm system?”

“Do you think anyone's going to rob your house in heaven?” my grandmother asked, as if it was the dumbest question.

So we went into my house.

Who told them how much I love Shabby Chic? Everything is Shabby Chic! All French-country plush sofas and chairs and pictures of my family in frames and, oh, a picture of Penelope and me from summer camp in 1979! Three bedrooms, all with eastern king-size beds and white Frette sheets with tons of eyelet pillows; oh, I love that so much. The beds are so high and plush, I'm like the princess and the pea. Oh my God, plasma screens in every room, with every channel on earth (or heaven, I guess) and every movie you'd ever want to see!

I have a Sub-Zero refrigerator and Wolf built-in ovens with All-Clad cookware and Le Creuset pots! I don't even cook! I wonder if they've got cooking classes. I wonder if I have to clean.

“You never have to clean!” my grandmother said, reading my mind. “It's a miracle, it all somehow cleans itself. There's no soap to clean it! The beds, too. You get out of bed and the bed is made! There's no washer/dryer because everything just cleans itself.”

“Watch this!” my uncle Morris said, throwing a glass of red wine onto his charcoal gray suit. As it disappeared right before our eyes, he said, “I did that for a week straight when I got up here. It killed me . . . well, it would have if the stroke hadn't gotten me first!”

Incredible!

“Same with your hair,” my grandmother said. “Oh, this is the greatest thing. Go now, dunk your head in some water and see what happens.”

So I did, and where? Oh yes, you're not going to believe this: I dunked my head in my luxury spa bathtub with nine (yes nine!) jets streaming out the softest, warmest water you could imagine. Or I could have just gone for the marble shower with the rainforest showerhead and nine (again, yes, nine!) jets in the shower. I'm going to use the sauna later.

Unbelievable! You dunk your head in the water and when you come up out of the water, your hair is dry, professionally blow-dried, like Sally Hershberger was here giving me a blow out. I had to try that a few more times.

Okay, now I must tell you the best and most incredible part about being in heaven. Oh my god, I have to sit down because you're not going to believe it. I can't even believe it myself. Obviously, it's not better than seeing my grandparents again or my uncle Morris, but it is wilder than any dream I could have ever imagined when thinking about what heaven could possibly be like. You might not agree with me, your heaven might be a lot different from my heaven. In my grandfather's version of heaven, he's got the Philadelphia Phillies playing games 24- 7. My grandmother has her old lemon Cadillac Coupe deVille and her hair is a foot high on top of her head. My uncle Morris has Cuban cigars. Me? Oh, if this isn't heaven, I just don't know what is.

Okay, ready?

ONE OF MY BEDROOMS IS A CLOSET! Not just any closet,
my dream closet!
Marc Jacobs, Valentino, Oscar de la Renta, anything you can think of: it's here! Theory and Diane von Furstenberg, Ella Moss, Rebecca Taylor, Rogan and Vince and Moschino Cheap and Chic line my closet. Chip & Pepper, Citizens of Humanity, James, Joe's, and True Religion jeans, and they all fit perfectly!

Let me take a breath before I tell you about the shoes.

Are you sitting down? Okay.

Christian Louboutin, Yves Saint Laurent, Chloé, Manolo, Antik Batik, Robert Clergerie, all in my size and none of them pinch! I know because I immediately started slipping them on.

And the bags! Marc Jacobs, Mulberry, ohhhh, Lanvin, the Louis Vuitton signature bucket bag, Henry Cuir—hello, my darling!

All of it is contained in a bedroom turned into a closet. Mirrored doors house everything, and if you'll excuse me, I see the red duchesse satin Vera Wang that Oprah wore to her Legends Ball and I have to try it on.

Okay, now I've really died and gone to heaven.

I just took off my clothes to try on Oprah's dress and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. What the . . . ?

“Grandmom? Where's my cellulite and my boob stretch marks? Where's my extra ten pounds?”

“Oh, for the last time!” my grandmother howls at me, “It's heaven! There's no cellulite or boob stretch marks or acne or pimples or oily skin or dry cracked hands or calluses or bunions or moles or anything! You're dead, a spirit!”

That's when I passed out for a few seconds.

When I came to, she was standing over me.

“Is now a good time to tell you that you can eat whatever you want and never gain weight?”

Yes, it was. That's when I went down to my Sub-Zero refrigerator and proceeded to eat the entire contents. The chocolate mud cake was particularly good. Graeter's ice cream from Ohio, water ice and Pat's cheesesteaks from Philadelphia, bagels and pizza from John's in New York, Chinese chicken salad from Chin Chin in Los Angeles, french fries from McDonald's!

After I finished my snacks, we walked out onto my patio with the stunning black-and-white awning, the edges blowing in the perfect seventy-five-degree breeze. At this point I decided to put on my Cathy Waterman pearls; it seemed only natural to wear pearls on a patio with a black-and-white striped awning and plush wicker benches and recliners.

With a bottle of chilled 1990 Krug vintage champagne from France and a bowl of the most delectable strawberries (don't know where they were grown, they just showed up in my refrigerator) , we sat outside under my awning, my grandfather listening to a Phillies game on his headphones, my uncle Morris quietly sipping his champagne between puffs of his Cohíba, my grandmother telling me about all of her friends who made it up here. “Henny Friedberg refuses to see Mort Friedberg and she dates a nice gentleman from eighteenth-century England.” As she gossiped, I could see someone moving into the house next door, a three-story Hamptons-style home. He was opening his back door. Was it . . . ?

“Adam!” I screamed out.

Gram stopped talking and immediately looked over at the house. Adam turned and looked back, still in his workout gear.

“Hey!” he called out, running over to the white picket fence that separated our lawns.

I picked up my red duchesse satin Vera Wang dress and proceeded to run in his direction, or tried to since Manolos, Vera Wang, and Cathy Waterman pearls are not made for running, even in heaven.

“You live right here?” I asked him.

“Yeah, isn't this crazy? This is a house I used to see in the Hamptons when I was a kid.”

“This is Len Jacobs's old house!” I said, pointing to my home.

“How crazy is this?” he declared. “Who is Len Jacobs?”

“Oh, he's some kid I went to school with. It doesn't matter,” I replied dismissively.

“Is this the greatest thing or what?”

“I see you dressed up for the occasion,” he said, remarking on my outfit.

How completely embarrassing.

“So, is this your family?” he asked as I turned around to find my grandparents and uncle standing right behind me, smiling in the way that only Jewish grandparents and uncles can smile when they see that their granddaughter/niece in her mid- (fine, late) twenties might have a boyfriend. (By the way, in case you're wondering what Jewish grandparents are doing in heaven anyway, when all along the rabbis have never breathed so much as a word about heaven, all I can say is that when you're standing face-to-face with your long-dead relatives, it's kind of hard to argue about why you're there. And we were never a very religious family anyway. I'm just going to point to what my grandmother said: “Remember, honey, it's heaven. You get what you want.”)