Anna in the Afterlife Read Online Free

solution to an unusual problem. This was a very small dinner party in the house of an artist friend of Janet’s where several couples gathered as a yearly event. None of them were Jews and their idea of a good meal was certainly not hers. Everything was brought in by a caterer. Next to each plate was a combination menu/place card (what you couldn’t do with computers these days!). The appetizers were smoked oysters on Norwegian crackers, red caviar on leaves of arugula, and tiny baked escargot with scallion soy butter. The main dish was a choice of either Peking duck with mango chutney and sun-dried Bing cherries or piccata of veal with fried capers and truffle sauce.
    Didn’t these people know from roast chicken and mashed potatoes? From brisket and kasha? From spaghetti and meatballs with Kraft Parmesan cheese? Why not something edible?
    Janet had no appetite, and no wonder, with her mother gasping her last in the nursing home. She toyed with spreading the pesto butter on the thirteen-grain organic wheat flour roll that, from the way Janet struggled to chew it, must have tasted like rubber galoshes. At least they would probably serve something her daughter could eat for dessert, something that would go down easily, like chocolate ice cream. But no: the caterer’s two serving girls, dressed in black tuxedos and bow ties, carried into the dining room some conflagration, a forest fire of crêpes suzette blazing with flaming cognac.
    From the fumes, Janet could hardly breathe. She covered her mouth with her napkin and fled to her host’s study and dialed the nursing home. It was then the nurse told her that her mother had passed on at 8:35 P.M. at which moment, outside in the trees, there was a great outcry from the wild parrots who daily screamed across the skies in pairs. “The birds know,” the nurse said. “So they cry for her soul.”
    Janet called those she had to tell: her sister Carol and her three daughters. She sat in her host’s study for twenty minutes, staring at the walls, at the portraits of nude women he was famous for painting, women without heads but with magnificent breasts and behinds. So much sex in the world and always on everyone’s minds. What was it all about? A sly trick of nature to guarantee that new babies got born to fill the void left by the old ones’ dying. A mechanical replacement system. What kind of nut had concocted this master plan, ruthless in its requirements that things continue, demanding there should always be someone being born and someone dying? And preferably—in every case—in anguish, torment, and pain.
    When Janet rejoined the party, her friends, though they had very strange tastes in food, understood, when she came back to the table trembling, that when a mother dies you don’t offer flaming fondue, you give a hug, you give many hugs, you hold on tight because the news of death is terrifying and the death of a mother seems like the end of the world no matter how old you are.
    Also because Janet’s friends were good people, they encouraged her to talk about Anna all the rest of the evening, now and then telling her how their mothers or fathers had died and stopping only at midnight to put on paper hats and to blow whistles and throw crepe paper snakes at the ceiling while everyone drank glasses of champagne.
    It turned out that the flu-bronchitis-pneumonia germ had been having a heyday. When Janet called the Burning Bush cemetery to arrange for her mother’s funeral, they told her Jews had been dying like flies after Christmas, there was only one slot left for a funeral, four days from now, on Sunday at one P.M., take it or leave it. Furthermore, she and Carol had to come in for a meeting on the Friday before the funeral to work out the details. “Bring the clothes you want your mother buried in and anything you want buried with her. Be on time. We’re under pressure here.”
    Just as Janet hung up the