“The Watcher” by Cynthia Weiner
In a daze, the morning after her mother’s sudden, and fatal, heart attack, Kate Ehrlich had agreed to nearly all the Jewish burial customs the funeral director recommended, even though neither she nor her mother had ever been the least bit religious. Better safe than sorry, he’d said, and Kate had let him check the boxes for a plain pine coffin, a ritual cleansing, and a Watcher—a man who would stay with her mother’s body until she was safely in the ground, keeping her emerging soul company as he read from the Book of Psalms. Now it was several hours later, close to midnight, and Kate was alone with the Watcher in a small, candle-lit room on the third floor of the West End Memorial Chapel. She stood in the doorway, across the room from the coffin, while he slouched in an armchair a few feet away and read aloud from his prayer book. He was in his early sixties, thirty years older than Kate: her mother’s age. His face was haggard, scattered with gray stubble and damp with sweat. In the air between them was the musky odor of bourbon. “I am weary with my moaning,” he moaned. “All night I make my bed swim.” He looked at her, and even as she looked away, Kate was sure his gaze was lingering on her breasts. She shivered, horrified that this leering, drunken man had been entrusted with the care of her mother’s soul, but each time she felt his glance, her heart jumped and her body swayed in his direction. She was sweating as heavily as he was, under her arms, down the backs of her thighs.
In the candlelight, everything in the room had a feverish shine. Vials of smelling salts shimmered. A vase of roses flashed sparks as if the stems inside had ignited. The tan carpet was the wet, rich brown of quicksand. The Watcher’s mouth was the slick purple of plums. Kate stared straight ahead. She’d been standing here for nearly half an hour, holding two shopping bags full of her mother’s things that she’d brought to put in the coffin. This morning, the funeral director had suggested the traditional burial garments, a loose linen gown, a little white cap, booties for the feet, but Kate had imagined her mother’s appalled expression—you’re going to make me parade around for eternity dressed like an infant?—and shaken her head. Her mother’s greatest pleasure had been her clothes, collected over a lifetime and tended to like flowers. She had a stack of diaries going back forty years, a daily chronicle of what she’d worn where: the poodle skirt to a high school dance, the velvet-trimmed tweed suit to visit her father at Sloan-Kettering, the picture hat with the big satin bow to watch Charles and Diana’s wedding on the BBC. Kate couldn’t remember a time when her mother hadn’t flinched as she looked her up and down, Kate’s indifferent jeans and T-shirts, or stared at her in a stricken way and said, “Do you have any idea how that shirt makes me feel?” or kept a little distance between them as they walked together down the street—but that didn’t mean she’d send her mother off wearing something she’d hate.
A few hours ago, Kate had dropped off a more dignified gray wool skirt and white silk blouse at the funeral home. But as the day wore on, she’d become more and more uneasy. She’d forgotten a sweater. She’d forgotten shoes and underwear. She’d forgotten a watch, a handbag, her mother’s glasses. After a while, she couldn’t even be sure she’d dropped off the skirt and blouse she thought she had. Rummaging through her mother’s closets, she’d been dizzy and nervous and she’d gone a little blind; it was entirely possible that in her anxiety she’d in fact grabbed something absurd and inappropriate, a decades-old pleated skirt and middy blouse, maybe, or denim overalls and fringed suede top from a years-ago Wyoming dude ranch vacation. By nighttime, the image had become intolerable: all the other mothers decked out in the pretty outfits their daughters had selected with tenderness, and taste, while Kate’s stood off to the side, cold and squinting, barefoot and braless, dressed like a sailor or a cowgirl.
November 3, 2010, she’d write in her diary—what was Kate thinking?
June 28, 2040—what was Kate thinking?
Now, in the lurching flames of the candles, the coffin’s shadow twisted and turned as if her mother were squirming impatiently inside. It was past midnight and Kate had to get home, work on the eulogy for tomorrow’s service—Good morning, was as far as she had gotten, thank you for being here—but the lid of the coffin was down and Kate had no idea how she’d get it open to put in the things she’d brought. She’d need a crowbar, or maybe a saw, neither of which she or her mother owned. It was too late to go to a hardware store. She thought about calling her father, but knew she’d be in for a half hour of convoluted, evasive chatter that boiled down to the same thing it had been boiling down to for the twenty-five years since the divorce: thank God she’s your problem, not mine.
The Watcher turned the pages on the prayer book. Kate could see that they dogeared and underlined. “My heart is like wax,” he read. “It is melted”—he glanced up at her—“in the midst of my bowels.” Surely it was against Jewish law to pry open a coffin, but at least he didn’t seem the type to try to stop her.
“Can you help me?” she asked. “I just need to put in a few things.”
He regarded her over the top of his prayer book, his eyes unreadable. In his black suit and black hat, he was hardly visible in the candlelight. “It hasn’t been sealed yet,” he said.
She crossed the room to the coffin, her stomach cramping with a mix of relief and apprehension. He pushed himself up from the armchair and came to stand beside her, so close she could feel his breath on her neck. She shut her eyes and breathed in the scent of bourbon and cigars. Her heart was pounding too hard; it seemed to have swelled to twice its size, flooding her body with heat. Sweat pooled in the small of her back. Beneath her jacket, her shirt stuck to her skin. She wondered what would happen if she asked him to hold her, to hold her down.
She heard her mother’s voice in her head: Over my dead body.
She stumbled backward a little, slamming her hip into the edge of the coffin. The Watcher put out his hand but she took another step away from him. What was she thinking? “I’m all right,” she said. She made her voice as cool as she could, imperious as her mother’s when people she thought ought to know better tried to get too familiar. (“Last name? A maitre d’, or the receptionist at the dentist’s, might ask. “Ehrlich.” “First name?” “Mrs.”) “Please,” Kate said to the Watcher, “proceed.” She looked deliberately at her watch. “I won’t be but a moment.”
He nodded and reached for the lid, pushing it back until it was propped against the wall. Here was her mother, her jaw rigid and her lips a thin, severe line. She did have on the gray skirt and silk blouse, but her uncovered legs looked too pale against the dark wool. The veins stood out like they’d been shot through with black ink. Her bare breasts showed through the flimsy top. Without her glasses, her face seemed vacant as the moon. Kate felt the frames of her own glasses digging into her temples. Her hands started to shake. The shopping bags banged against her legs, and she let them fall to the ground.
The smell of bourbon rising from the Watcher was making her feel reckless, drunk off the fumes. Kate had hardly touched her mother even when she was alive—certainly not her face, not since she was a child—but now she laid her hand on her cold, unyielding cheek. She raised her other hand to her own face. Her fingers, still trembling, were warm and slippery with sweat. Beneath them, she could feel her muscles twitching, the lunge of her pulse in her jaw. She drew her thumb across her mother’s cheekbone. She’d heard that the dead often appeared angry, the muscles stiffening as death set in, but she hadn’t expected to feel her own, answering anger. A current of helpless, dry-eyed rage was rocketing up her spine—even in the candlelight, her hand on her mother’s face was a bright, almost incandescent white. A roar filled her ears, a gust of fire crackling with all the ugly sounds she’d ever heard, the grubbiest profanities, the cruelest insults, the iciest silences. There were cries and complaints and accusations. There were glasses shattering and doors crashing shut. She yanked her hand off her mother’s face, but her ears still burned.
Beside her, the Watcher took a wrinkled handkerchief from his pants pocket and dabbed at his cheeks and neck. His shirt was damp around the collar. Kate felt her own blouse damp around her throat, the collar so tight it seemed to have shrunk. Standing like this over her mother reminded her of nights twenty years before when she was in high school and still living at home, how on the way to her own bedroom after she’d been out at a bar or a club, she’d stop in the doorway of her mother’s bedroom—her father was already gone—and stand there for a minute in the dark watching her mother sleep. Kate had been a little wild then and she might be drunk or high, or something frightening might have happened out in the night, the way somebody had looked at or touched her, but standing amid the familiar smells of face cream and tissues, the TV remote on the night table beside a glass of water and the shape of her mother beneath the chenille bedspread, she’d feel reassured by the ordinary blandness of it all, and soon she’d be yawning and ready for sleep. Until one night her mother opened her eyes and said acidly, “What the hell are you staring at?”
The Watcher began reading again from the tattered pages of his prayer book. Kate’s head still blazed with noise, but his voice was loud and insistent, and she heard “hot displeasure” and “thy hand preseth me sore” and “my groaning is not hid from thee.” The darkness around him glittered with candlelight. His hair was shining silver and his eyes were gleaming gold. “For my loins are filled with burning,” he said. Kate looked down at her mother’s face. It was blank and white as bone. Where was her soul? Had it emerged yet? Was it here with them, in this room? Kate felt another wave of heat surge through her. She wedged two fingers into the collar of her blouse and pulled it away from her body. Her glasses fogged up, and the room went patchy. Behind her now, the Watcher had started to rock in time to the cadence of his prayers. He was breathing hard; Kate inhaled a cloud of bourbon. He gripped his prayer book with both hands. “My heart panteth,” he said. “My strength faileth me.” Kate took a step back and allowed the Watcher to press himself against her, as her mother lay before them, silent and still.
Cynthia Weiner has had a long career writing and teaching fiction. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Epiphany, and her story “Boyfriends” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. She is also the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City.
A Gorgeous Excitement, her first novel, was inspired by her upbringing on New York’s Upper East Side in the 1980s, and particularly by the notorious “Preppy Murder” of 1986. The novel has been featured in The New Yorker, Town & Country, Oprah Daily, and People Magazine, among others.
Weiner now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
