CHAPTER 16
Nina
In 1978, after three years on St. Thomas, Chendo and I moved back to New York. The island had been a perfect getaway, but both Chendo and I knew it couldn’t last forever. We missed our families, and I missed living in a big city. We decided to come home. My husband went to work for his father’s jewelry business, and I found a job at Bergdorf Goodman’s department store at the Clinique cosmetics counter. We bought a small co-op apartment together in Queens, not far from his parents.
While we had been gone, the Dream House on Long Island had been sold, but for far less money than my parents had hoped. While they had been waiting for the divorce to come through, they had rented out the place, but the renters had neglected to take care of the property, and the house had fallen into disrepair. Cabinets had been ripped out of the walls, doors were hanging on hinges, and the bathtubs were coated with rust. The garden had grown over, my father’s beloved marigold beds were filled with weeds, and there were beer cans strewn around the property. For a time, the Dream House stood abandoned altogether, the neighborhood kids using the yard as a passageway to tramp down to the beach.
After the sale of the house was completed, my father and mother took an equal share from the proceeds. My mother had been living in Philadelphia with Robin. Now she was able to move into an apartment in Manhattan on West Fifty-eighth Street.
This was where she was living the night of January 28, 1979, the night my father knocked on her door late, wearing a black suit.
He had come to tell her the news from which my mother—in fact, all of us—would never recover. Robin was dead.
That night, my sister had gone on a date. The guy owned a brand-new yellow Corvette. He was driving Robin home. He lost control of the car, hitting a bridge abutment. He survived, but no one could save Robin. When the paramedics reached the scene of the accident, “Stairway to Heaven” was playing on the car radio.
Chendo was the one to tell me. We were staying at his parents’ house in Queens. I remember I fell to the floor; I lay there in a fetal position, holding myself as the sobs racked my body. Chendo’s little sisters came into the room. I remember they were staring down at me; I knew I was scaring them, but there was nothing I could do. I felt like I couldn’t breathe; how would I ever live in a world without her?
A week later, our family came together in Philadelphia for Robin’s funeral. My mother, Jill, Patricia, and I gathered around Robin’s open casket to say our good-byes. We were all distraught, my mother silent, her eyes hollow with pain, the powder on her face streaked with tears. My sister’s beautiful face was expressionless, painted with the thick mortician’s makeup. She was wearing the long-sleeved navy-blue dress with a white collar that my mother had picked out for her. I remember my mother leaned down into the coffin and tenderly moved Robin’s legs, one away from the other, before she went to her grave. A mother’s final gesture of care.
After we said our good-byes, I turned to my mother and sisters and asked that we make a pact to be close. We had been through so much—illness, divorce, tragedy—but it was clear to me that Robin would want us to come together now, to move forward as a united front. I hoped we could, for her.
My father was also at the funeral. I had never seen him so upset. His relationship with Robin had always been tumultuous, but after years of estrangement, they had recently reconnected. My father had gone to see one of Robin’s concerts, and my sister had taken it as a sign that they could move forward. The church that day was full of Robin’s friends; so many people had wanted to come to pay their respects. Patricia, Jill, and I stood up in the front and read the lyrics from one of Robin’s songs, “Lady in Waiting.” “You’ll still guide my hand, through a world that I don’t understand,” Robin had written, “and you’ll still protect me from the pain, when you’re gone. Oh when you’re gone, I will remain.”
Robin’s loss was more than any of us could bear, but it completely devastated our mother. Of her three daughters, Robin was the one who could make my mother laugh, who could actually put her at ease. When my mother and Robin talked, they had long conversations where my mother actually opened up and shared what was in her heart. Robin had always been so confident and calm, and even Robin couldn’t be saved. Robin’s death marked the point my mother gave up; the rest of her life became a kind of endurance.
After Robin died, I completely shut down. Robin was the only person I ever really trusted in my family to tell me the truth and to support me. I blamed myself completely for her death. I had planned to visit my sister that weekend of her death, but at the last minute I had canceled. If I’d been with her, she never would have gone out on the date. She might still be here with us.
My relationship with Chendo suffered. We couldn’t agree on where to live. I wanted to be in Manhattan, not in Queens, but his parents wanted us close by. We were still so young, barely out of our teens, and the pressure of marriage and buying a home was too much for
