The Ten Best Days of My Life Read online

  It was at this point that I wondered if I should have told him to get in line with me. I envisioned asking Mrs. O’Malley whether it would be all right if the hot guy cut in line next to me so I could flirt more. It seemed sacrilegious.

  “Maybe I could get in touch with you sometime,” he said.

  “Yeah, okay,” I answered as I noticed the Braunsteins smiling at me in that way only Jewish parents who want to see a woman get a boyfriend can.

  “That is, if they have phones up here,” he chuckled.

  “Yeah,” I chuckled back. Ugh, pathetic.

  And then he went back to his part of the line behind the German schoolchildren and the two old guys playing poker. I looked back at him a couple of times, and he waved and I waved, but that was it. Please let there be phones in heaven.

  Now, believe it or not, for a line with ten thousand people, everything moves pretty quickly. It might have been all that talking and drinking and flirting, but I swear it only took about twenty minutes. They must have really worked on that. I’m sure people have complained throughout the centuries. You finally get up to the gate, which, by the way, really is a gate, and it really is pearly.

  “Hi, Alex. Hello, Peaches,” a lovely brunette angel with a clipboard greeted us. “Welcome to heaven. Check-in for you is at Building Blissful,” she continued, handing me a map. I took a look at the map. All the buildings were named something heavenly: Building Divine, Building Harmonious, Building Idyllic, and so on. That made me laugh. Heaven is so cliché.

  Now I’m in some kind of waiting room inside Building Blissful. The angel told me that here I’ll find out where I’m going to live. Adam was sent to Building Utopia. Mrs. Braunstein also got Building Blissful, but Mr. Braunstein got Building Idyllic.

  “I’m so glad to get rid of him for a bit,” she confided to me. “If he bugs me one more time about not turning that oven off all the way . . . What more can I say? Everyone makes mistakes.”

  So, now we’re in this room, waiting. It’s a lovely room, decorated with light blue walls and comfy butter-cream leather sofas. Looks like a clubhouse at any upscale country club. There’re about twenty of us in here. Again, there’s a full bar and more food. I went straight to the salad bar and made myself a vegetable salad with dressing on the side. Since I didn’t have the hors d’oeuvres, I felt justified in having a salad. Mrs. Braunstein went right to the sundae bar. She nudged me as she passed. “I’m dead, why worry anymore?”

  “Alex?” Another angel calls out just as I’m finishing the last of my salad. “They’re ready for you.”

  I give Mrs. Braunstein a kiss good-bye, and we tell each other we’ll try to get together as soon as we know where we’re going.

  “I’ll look around for that Adam,” she says. “You two made a great-looking couple.”

  Seriously, that guy was so hot. Please, please let there be phones in heaven.

  I’m blowing her a kiss as I walk out of the waiting room. The angel and I are heading out to the common area and . . . wait, oh my God, is that, is it? Oh my God, it’s my grandparents!

  It’s Like I Died and Went to Heaven

  My grandparents are here! I’m still shaking. I was told that early on, like centuries and centuries ago, everyone just met up with their family right at the gates of heaven, but it became too much of a mosh pit with everyone screaming and hugging and being hysterical. No one could get anything done. So they built these buildings like Building Blissful to keep things moving along and organized.

  I’m sorry that I cut off so abruptly back there, but when you see your grandparents who you haven’t seen since they died some twenty years ago, it kind of takes your breath away (no pun intended). No one even told me that they would be here. I honestly forgot that I would see them. I just assumed I was in this whole heaven thing alone.

  I walked out of that waiting room, and they were just standing there: my grandmother and my grandfather and my uncle Morris.

  The feeling of seeing my grandmother for the first time, with no offense to my grandfather or uncle Morris, was the most hysterical feeling I’ve ever known. We had been so close before she died. I missed her so much. I’d thought about her almost every day for the last twenty years and here she was. It was her, her high-pitched nasal voice, her smell of lilacs and Aqua Net hair spray. I couldn’t stop hugging her. I couldn’t stop looking at her. I kept staring at her face. Of course I had pictures of her in my apartment back on earth, but to see her in front of me, each line on her face, the way her red hair was hardened so perfectly into a helmet on top of her head and “high” like she’d tell the stylist at the beauty parlor when I was a kid, “The hair needs to be higher!” It was her, my grandmother, in the flesh . . . er, spirit. I couldn’t stop crying and shaking.

  “I missed you so much,” I cried to her.

  “I know, sweetheart,” she said, “and now we’re together again, and we’ll be together for a long, long time.”

  “Look how much she’s grown,” my grandfather said, reaching his arms out to me. “She’s a woman.”

  “I am,” I screamed hysterically. “I am, I grew up!” And then things just started pouring out of me. “I went to the high school prom and I went to college and I moved to Los Angeles and, Grandmom, I took care of my teeth. Remember on your deathbed when you told me to take care of my teeth? I did! Look at my teeth, I never had a cavity and I brushed and flossed every day!” I screamed as I flashed my mouth at her.

  “When did I ever say anything about your teeth?” She asked me.

  “On your deathbed, it was the one thing you asked of me.”

  “Why would I tell you to take care of your teeth?” She started laughing.

  “Well, you did. You told me to take care of my teeth and then you died.”

  “I must have been so out of it,” she said, dismissing the one thing I did to help keep her memory alive. “Well, I guess it wasn’t the worst thing to ask of you.”

  This pissed me off a bit.

  “Wait a minute,” I winced. “What about the dreams? I used to dream about you a lot, was that really you in my dreams?”

  My grandparents smiled at me.

  “Yes, of course.” My grandmother smiled at Grandpop and uncle Morris, who smiled back at her. They really did come into my dreams. I want to ask if I can do that too, but before I get a chance I’m being passed from my grandmother’s embrace to my uncle Morris’s. I guess they’ll teach me how to do that later. I must check in on my parents.

  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?
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  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 s
ize 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 . . . ?