by Wally Lamb
“What?” I said, when he opened his eyes again.
“A poem was just beginning to form itself in my head. The idea was embryonic and now I’ve lost it. Thanks a lot.”
For Grandma’s sake, I tried to stay with the funeral mass, but my mind kept wandering away from Father Duptulski’s ritual—drifting in a patternless way. Touches and sounds were what came to me: the bristly feel of Ma’s neck after she came home from the state hospital with her close-cropped haircut, the pattern of creaks Grandma’s footsteps made on the stairs when she went up to bed nights. The gurgle and hum of that suction machine at the abortion clinic.
“And now, we offer one another a sign of peace, asking God to remember the soul of Thelma, one of His faithfully departed, who has rejoined Him in the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The old ladies’ hands came at me from behind. “Peace be with you,” we all said, shaking on it, like a deal. “Peace be with you.”
* * *
At the cemetery, a warm Indian-summer breeze blew against my face. The pallbearers—Dante, Mrs. Mumphy’s son and sons-in-law, and two old men from the Knights of Columbus—carried Grandma’s coffin from the purring hearse to the platform above her grave. Twelve old people had ridden out to the cemetery. I counted them, like Grandma would have done.
When Father Duptulski was through, Bug Eyes stepped forward and cleared his throat. “Mr. and Mrs. Davis would like to invite everyone back to Mrs. Holland’s home at two sixty-two Pierce Street for a luncheon buffet.” For a second, I didn’t realize he was talking about Dante and me.
When everyone else headed back to their cars, I stood alone and broke a red carnation off the spray that covered her coffin, kissed it and put it back. The limousine rolled smoothly and slowly over the cemetery grass. I rested my head against Dante’s shoulder.
Mrs. Mumphy and three other ladies came back to the house. I sat them in a row on the water bed. “Thelma never told us she was a hippie,” one of them laughed. “God rest her soul.”
They murmured amongst themselves out front while Dante and I peeled cold cuts off the stack and arranged them on a plate. “Get that coffeepot going and put those blueberry squares out on this thing,” I whispered. “We should have had all this stuff ready. I hate this.”
My plan was to keep him busy out in the kitchen in case one of them started reminiscing about me, exposing my secrets.
“I can’t tell you how profound it was—the feeling of my hand inside those gray silk pallbearer’s gloves,” he said. His eyes were closed again; he’d stopped working. “I think I’ve got to write about it now or I’ll lose it.”
“The hell you will,” I hissed. “You stay here and help.” But he was already headed for the foyer. “If you ladies will excuse me,” I heard him say.
In that big, bare front room, there was no place to put the plates of food but on the floor. The ladies didn’t seem to mind. They fed like sharks. I was right about them loving desserts the best. You didn’t ring up people’s groceries for years without learning about human nature.
I thought they’d leave after they stopped eating, but they just sat there, talking about people I didn’t even know. A plump little woman, Edna, reached past me and took the very last blueberry crumb square, the one I was planning to reward myself with after they left. She bit into it and asked me if Dante and I had any children yet.
“Well, no,” I said.
“Female trouble?”
Nodding seemed like the easiest way out.
“Well, it was probably all that weight you piled on a while back. My sister-in-law was a heavyset woman. Big-boned. She and my poor brother tried and tried. The weight raises the dickens with your female system.” She took pictures of her grandchildren out of her purse and told me their names and ages. “Now these two are in the Talented and Gifted program at their school,” she said. “The older one’s doing sixth-grade arithmetic and he’s only in the third grade.”
“They’re cute,” I said, “in a hamsterish kind of way.”
“Beg your pardon?” she said. The other ladies halted their conversations to listen.
“I said they’re cute. By the way, you’ve got some blueberry stuck on your front tooth.”
At their request, I hoisted them all off the bed and got the coats.
* * *
At the sink, I did the dishes and cried at how touchy and mean I’d been to those old ladies. I should have made potato salad. If only Dante had stayed downstairs and done the talking. He’d locked himself in Grandma’s bedroom for over an hour. I went up the stairs, hesitated, then knocked. “Not now,” he called out.
Downstairs there was a thumping on the front porch, the doorbell.
Her face looked as brown and wrinkled as a walnut shell and the black wig didn’t quite fit her skull. “Remember me?” she said.
“Roberta! Oh my God!”
“Figured I’d wait and pay my respects after all the old biddies left,” she said. “Holy Christ, look at you.”
I swung the door open wide. An aluminum walker had done the thumping. She hoisted it up the step to the foyer floor. She was wearing a lavender jogging suit and red canvas sneakers.
She clunked her way into the living room, aimed her rear toward Grandma’s big chair, and free-fell backwards with a sigh. “So how you been?” she said. “Where’s the ashtray?”
The walker sat in front of her like a cage. With her shaky hand, she lit a cigarette. I offered to make her a sandwich. “Well, all right,” she said. “Just cheese, though. I’m a vegetarian.”
“The baby rat in the can of beef stew, right?”
“That’s right!” she said. “So anyways, I’m sorry about Thelma. Her and I never had much use for each other, but to tell you the truth, I think we admired each other’s crust.” Then she told me a dirty joke about a man cursed with a three-foot penis. In that bawdy, open-mouthed laugh, you could hear every cigarette she’d ever smoked.
The provolone sandwiches I made us tasted uncommonly good. “I’m one, too, now,” I said.
“One what?”
“A vegetarian.”
“Good for you! Meat clogs the blood vessels to your brain. Makes you think better if you don’t eat it—I read it somewheres. So let me give you a piece of advice, Dolores: don’t ever get Parkinson’s disease. Had the shakes for over four years now—like dancin’ all day without a partner.” She laughed at herself, so I laughed, too. “And these migraines—if I don’t eat right, man-oh-boy! You know what I told the doc? I said, ‘Listen, Moneybucks, I’ll get rid of old man Parkinson and you and me can get lovey-dovey.’ Got any beer to go with these?”
I shook my head. “I can go across to the store and get some.”
“That’s okay. The doc ain’t exactly wild about my drinking beer with the pills I’m on. So anyways, about your grandmother—you remember that blizzard last year, the big one?”
I nodded. “We didn’t get it as bad as you did.”
“Yeah, well—she called me on the telephone that night to see if I needed anything. Wouldn’t give me the time of day for all these years, then she calls me up during that snowstorm. Says she’s just sittin’ there watchin’ the backyard fill up with snow and she wonders if I need anything.” Roberta laughed. “Two crusty broads, that’s what we both were. That’s how we both made it. You got any matches around? My cigarette lighter’s runnin’ out. All’s I’m gettin’ is a spark. Yup, she and I both had a tough row to hoe—Thelma and me—but we both shut up and hoed it. Hey, how’d you lose all that weight, anyways? You were a two-ton Tillie for a while there.”
I heard Dante walking above our heads. From the top of the stairs he called to me to please keep it down; he was at a crucial place.
“Who’s that?” Roberta asked.
“My husband. Dante.”
“Lighten up, sweetie,” she called up to him. “Come down and join the party. Life’s too short.” She stuffed the rest of her first sandwich into her mouth. Her cheeks bulged out as she
chewed and talked. “Other day, Dial-a-Ride brought a bunch of us down to Kmart. This is funny—listen to this. I was the first one done with my shopping—see, all’s I was gettin’ was a new oven mitt and some Polident. I go along mostly for the company, you know, just to get out. The doc always tells me, ‘Roberta, you keep your mobility.’ He means keep movin’ around. You sit around feelin’ sorry for yourself and you’re dead. Sittin’ on your ass can get to be a disease worse than what you got. Where was I?”
“Dial-a-Ride?” I said.
“Oh, yeah, right. So I got my stuff and the girl at the register puts these other things in my bag, too. Little free samples: gum and a comb and a marker pen. So I says to her, ‘Look, girlie, I got false teeth and I wear a wig.’ So she fishes back in my bag and takes out the comb and the gum. Left the pen in there. Anyways, I went back to the van, even though I knew it was locked. Figured I’d just wait and have a smoke. You can’t smoke inside the van, see? So while I’m waiting there, minding my own business, this car pulls into the handicapped space right next to us—brand-new car, white and clean, and it’s got this bumper sticker on it that says, ‘Life Is a Shit Sandwich.’ Isn’t that stupid? So this guy gets out—good-lookin’ fella, in his twenties. I say to him, ‘Hey, handsome, tell me something.’ He takes a look at my walker and gets all panicky. ‘I’m just running in for two seconds,’ he says. See, he thinks I’m going to yell at him for parking in a handicapped space, but I ain’t. I don’t give a rat’s ass about that, you see. I’d rather walk the extra ten feet than be called handicapped. Where was I?”
She amazed me. “Life’s a shit sandwich,” I said.
“Oh, yeah. Right. So that guy goes runnin’ into the store and here’s what I did. I fished that free pen out of the bag and marched right over there to that bumper of his. Got myself right down on the ground—and I wrote—just after the ‘Life’s a shit sandwich’ part—I wrote, ‘But only if you’re a shithead.’ ’Course, then I couldn’t get myself back up again—had to yell over to a couple of kids at the phone booth to come pick me back up. They got all excited—thought someone had run me over!”
She paused for a drag on her cigarette. “Life’s a shit sandwich, my ass. Life’s a polka and don’t you forget it!” she said.
I felt better than I’d felt in weeks. “Uh, you were asking before how I lost the weight? . . .” Before I could stop myself, I was explaining about college and Gracewood and my technique of imagining mold. “You’re the first one I ever told all this to,” I said. “Including him.” I pointed up toward the ceiling.
She stared at me without laughing. “Well,” she said, “if I was you, I’d tell the whole goddamned world. Write one of them diet books—make yourself a couple million dollars.”
By the time Dante came downstairs, the air was thick with smoke and Roberta and I had each had two of the beers I’d run across to the superette and bought. I was barefoot and sloshing around on the water bed, smoking the third cigarette I’d bummed.
Roberta and Dante took turns sizing each other up. I watched his eyes dart with alarm from her walker to the red sneakers to the ashtray she’d filled. “I was just tellin’ your wife how I got my show at the radio station. I do the Sunday-morning polka hour. So anyways, Dolores, the station manager comes to the phone and I says to him, ‘Listen, hon, you got all these happy-go-lucky polkas and, in between ’em, that announcer guy sounds like you dug him up at the cemetery or something.’ So this station manager guy’s a real smartass over the phone. He says to me, ‘Oh, well, why don’t you go to broadcast school and then send us an audition tape—show us how it’s done.’ So that’s what I did. Called his bluff, except I didn’t send any tape. I brought myself down there live and made that station manager sit and listen. Comes to find out, I gave him a tattoo once, a tiger lily right on his hairy ass—both of us remembered each other. So now I’m the Polka Princess every Sunday morning from ten to eleven. That was my idea to call myself that: the Polka Princess. Just like, what’s her name, Lady Diane over there in England. I tell you, hon, put that microphone in front of me and I throw a party!”
When I got back from walking her across the street, Dante was spraying the air with Glade. “I give up,” he said. “What was that?”
“Roberta Jaskiewicz. The lady who ran the tattoo parlor.”
He held up her lipstick-smeared glass and said he hoped to Christ that whatever she had wasn’t contagious.
“Yeah, life’s just a big shit sandwich, isn’t it, Dante?” I said.
He sighed. “If you’re angry because I didn’t help you entertain those old women, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but the poetic impulse is fragile.”
He went out to the kitchen and came back with the packages of uneaten cold cuts and one of Roberta’s and my beers.
“You see,” he said, “it started with the feel of my hand inside the gray pallbearer’s glove. That was the inspiration, the inception of the whole thing. It’s hard to explain. Intellectually, I was trying to make it an elegy—at least that’s what I would have predicted it would become. Except it wasn’t feeling elegiac. It was feeling . . . well, sexual. Isn’t that odd?”
He tilted his head back and dropped whole slices of boiled ham into his mouth, chewing as he talked.
“Then, sitting up there amidst all your grandmother’s Catholic trappings, the most intimate thing happened—the force was undeniable . . . Any of those pumpernickel rolls left? . . . You see, I’d been blocked for the first hour or so because I was missing the point. It was the feel of the gloves, not their symbolic quality, that interested me. The sensual aspect. So finally I said, ‘Okay, fuck it, Davis. Fuck all these plaster saints looking at you.’ I let the poem swerve toward the erotic—gave it that permission—and I was freed.”
“Freed?”
“Yes! Amidst all those saints and martyrs, with all those dried-up talking vaginas downstairs. The dynamic was incredible. It just overtook me. To the point where, in the middle of the writing, I stood up, pulled down my pants, and masturbated myself to orgasm. It wasn’t a choice; it was an act of survival. Hold on a minute. The poem is rough still but I want you to hear it.”
He ran up the stairs and back down again. “Okay, listen.”
The solitary pallbearer shoots his seed,
His liquid sex, into the night air
A trajectory
While icons, saints
Bear their blank-eyed Catholic witness. . . .
“You were doing that while I was down here with Grandma’s friends?”
He smiled proudly. “It’s still very rough, I know, but the components are all there. This house is alive to me! I feel the most incredible psychic energy here. It’s radioactive—poetically.”
“I have to be back day after tomorrow,” I said. “I’m working days at the store through November.”
That night I locked the door to Grandma’s room and lay back on her bed, rolling the rusty pebble between my thumb and finger. I’d found his stain on the rug near the foot of Grandma’s bed, had gotten a washcloth and rubbed the spot clean, harder and longer than was necessary.
* * *
“Where are we?” I asked, waking up. Dante had insisted on driving. We were parked at a Burger King off the interstate.
“Holyoke, Mass. Could you order? I’ve got to take a leak.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know—Whopper with cheese, large fries, vanilla shake.”
I approached the stainless-steel counter reluctantly. Fast-food cashiers had so little patience with the indecisive.
“Welcome to Burger King. We flame-broil not fry. Can I help you?”
A freckly, strawberry-blond teenage girl. Like Sheila, who I’d been thinking about before I’d fallen asleep. I repeated Dante’s order and she punched her cash register keys. “Is that it?”
“Uh . . . and a cup of tea, I guess.”
“Cream and sugar, ma’am?”
&
nbsp; “Well, whatever. Okay. Yes, please.”
“Five eighty-five, ma’am.”
It was mid-afternoon, an off hour. There were empty booths all around us. As Dante approached, I saw the path our life was making: one continuous Etch-a-Sketch line, looping back and forth through gray.
He took his hamburger out of the box, bit a large crescent shape out of it, and chewed. I looked away. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Our apartment lease is up in less than three months. What do you say we move down to your grandmother’s house.”
“I’ve been thinking, too,” I said. “In a way, you raped her.”
“What?”
“Your high school girlfriend. Sheila. You raped her.”
He looked around to see if anyone was listening. Then he put down his Whopper. “How do you figure that?”
“You took advantage of her.”
“Oh, right,” he laughed. “When she orchestrated the whole thing? Calling me three or four times a day? Walking right into the apartment without even knocking?”
“You’re thirty and she’s, what, seventeen? You raped her by being almost twice her age.”
He took a sip of his shake, staring at me. “I hope you know you’ve got it all wrong,” he said. “I tried to tell you before. Kids today aren’t innocent. If anything, the little cunt raped us. My career. You and me. Not that this is the appropriate place to go into any of this.”
I dangled and dangled my tea bag. “You know what’s funny?” I said. “That I stayed a vegetarian and you didn’t.”
“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
“At first, I didn’t eat meat just to please you. I thought it was what you wanted, so I did it. Now it makes me sick to even think about eating it. As a matter of fact, I’m getting this little pukey feeling just watching you with that hamburger. It’s like the feeling I used to get at the mental hospital, when I imagined mold growing all over my food. I used to weigh over two hundred and fifty pounds.”
He let go a nervous, bewildered laugh. “Is this just some random kind of mind fucking or am I supposed to be following your train of thought?”
