by Toni Graham
“Come inside, Dave,” she says. “You’ve been sitting here for half an hour.” The rain has become a soaking downfall, and Beth’s hair hangs in wet sheaves, lightning illuminating her face like a flashbulb shot capturing a catastrophe. “It’s just the grief,” Beth says, “the grief, that’s all it is.”
He leans out the car window, reaching toward Beth, the cold rain soaking his outstretched hand. His wife’s weeping has a muffled quality, as if she cries behind a partition. She seems far away, pearly in the downpour like a Las Vegas stage illusion.
What is vivid in this moment is Slater’s vision of what might be possible. He sees himself now, flying back to the scene of that dismal afternoon, this time wearing his invisibility cloak. He swoops down on the casket before the ghoulish undertakers can lower his father into the soil.
THE SUICIDE CLUB
If you would have a thing shrink, You must first stretch it.
Tao Te Ching
Holly learned the Vicks VapoRub trick from a long-ago boyfriend, a firefighter. When firefighters need to perform cadaver removal from an accident site, they goop up their upper lips with the ointment, as it does a fine job of masking the odor of decomposing corpses. She stands in front of the bathroom medicine cabinet, rubbing a thick glob of VapoRub underneath her nose. The burn of the menthol fumes rising in her nostrils furnishes blessed relief, even if the smell clashes with the sandalwood incense she has lit. Until she remembered the factoid about Vicks, she had not been sleeping well, because of the stench.
Her cadavers are those of rodents, poisoned mice that died in the crawl space beneath her house. Friends warned her not to put poison in the basement, that the vermin would die on her property and smell up the house, but what else could she do? She was not about to set out traps and then be faced with the pungent remains of squashed mice. One needs a husband to dispose of trapped rodents. Or a fiancé, but Reed is as dead as the mice.
After she slips into bed, she remembers that she has not yet checked the Web for today’s prospects. Does she care enough to get up and log on, or should she let the search wait until morning? She thinks she hears a rustling—is it Teddy; is he okay? But then she remembers her eight-year-old son is in California with his dad for the summer. Oh gosh, what if the sound is a mouse? She is sitting up now, not having really intended to, just like stories she has heard about dead bodies flipping up into a sitting position in a particularly vigorous case of rigor mortis.
She listens awhile, hears nothing. She beams a flashlight around the room and into the closet, sees nothing. Now she is hyper-alert. She may as well go online.
Her group therapist, Dr. Jane, suggested the online dating service, an idea that at first mortified Holly. Never in her life did she imagine that she would have to troll for dates; she has never been hard up for men. Until now. And though she would never say this to anyone, she has always felt that matchmaking, like Broadway musicals, is something more in the purview of Jewish folks than of WASPs. But, as Dr. Jane told the members of the suicide survivors group Holly attends, one needs to be proactive if one expects to move into the final stage of grief. One needs to integrate the loss and move on.
Holly brings her laptop into bed and logs on to e-Luv. She has chosen as her screen name Sandy_Agow, a subliminal nod to her birthplace, San Diego. The first two weeks she was a member of e-Luv, she was thrilled every morning to check for potential dates, hoping that just the right man would pop up on the screen, a man who could make her let go of Reed—“integrate” the loss. But the progression of men has included a long queue of undesirables. She has been sent men with no hair, men with poor grammar, men named Les and Ralph and Wally, men who have personal relationships with Jesus, men who read Ayn Rand, men who bowl.
Tonight Divorcé #1 at first looks like an actual possibility: he has thick dark hair, intense brown eyes, and at first glance nothing seems wrong with him. But as she reads his profile, disappointment washes over her. He is named Sandor, and he reveals he has never been married (at age forty-nine). In the space where one is asked to reply to “What secret about you do only your best friends know?” he states that he cries very easily. She zooms on his posted photo to increase its size, and she now sees that the poor man has a weak chin. Sure, answering a question like that can be tough; her own answer was “Find out, Mister!”
The boxes to check to indicate religion include Christian, Jewish, spiritual but not affiliated with any particular religion, atheist, and other. He has checked “other.” What is he, a male Wiccan? No, those people are usually tremendously obese. Maybe he’s a full-bore Satanist, a weeping Satanist.
E-Luv enables its clients to click on a box that says, “Close match now.” She clicks this box at the bottom of weepy Sandor’s page. His face vaporizes into cyberspace.
The odor of sandalwood is beginning to ease her into a better frame of mind. She has lit incense in every room in the house, and sandalwood-ginger scented-oil candles burn in the bedroom, and the fragrance has broken through the VapoRub. Maybe the aromatherapy concept is not hokum, after all.
Divorcé #2 is named Cliff. He would not be so bad if he had known enough to shave off the mustache that gives him that seventies look. But she cannot really post on the e-Luv Contact Board a message advising Cliff that he needs to lose the mustache if he expects to get a woman. She does not wish to sound as shallow as some of the men on e-Luv do. One of them, a very handsome guy with a full head of hair and a cleft chin, specified exactly what kind of woman he wanted: “A wholesome, Monica Potter type,” he stated. He had added, just in case, “Look her up.” Holly had, against her better judgment, googled Monica Potter. She learned the woman was a young blond actress. Potter’s shoulder-length hair blew in the wind in one of the photos on the Web. From the looks of her, she was probably twenty years younger than the bachelor. Holly remembered a Randy Newman song from when she was a kid, in which Newman sang, “Jesus, what a jerk.”
Holly is happy to be at work; the shop smells like books. Sometimes she thinks the real reason she decided to open a bookstore was so she could breathe in the scent of books all day, six days a week—the ink, the paper, the cloth of the hardbounds—as heady as an aphrodisiac. H. Hemenway, Booksellers, reads the sign on the shop’s facade. The “s” forming the plural “booksellers” represents a bit of a pose, as she is sole owner and the only real salesperson, unless you count Cadon, the college student she employs part-time, who is a desultory salesperson at best. Using what was left of her divorce settlement to pull up stakes in Los Angeles and open her own bookstore in a college town in Oklahoma was a very bad choice in today’s business climate, with independent bookstores falling like dominos. And the fact is, she had never so much as taken a business course in college, nor had she ever worked as a shopgirl when she was still a student. Her job history consists of only two places of employment: an editorial position at Houghton Mifflin after she graduated and a tech writing job in L.A. with the Motion Picture Academy’s film archives.
Reed had been given a great opportunity with a start-up in Oklahoma City, or so he claimed. Holly had been so crazy about him that she could not bear to stay behind in California when he decided to move to OKC. The past few months have made it clear that one might be advised not to buy a bookstore just because one likes to read and has worked in the publishing end of the book business. She has begun to realize that she may be like the fat guy who loves to eat and to cook but who goes belly-up when he opens a restaurant.
The shop is empty this morning, save for her and Cadon. She has opened up only moments before and is rearranging some greeting cards on a rack before the walk-in traffic begins. The bar mitzvah cards are not selling and are beginning to look dusty and faded—she should have known not to order ethnic or non-Christian cards in a place like Hope Springs. She assumed the state university campus in town would include a sufficient number of Jewish faculty, but apparently either she guessed incorrectly or the Jewish faculty are keeping a very low profile in Hope Springs.
The Christian bookstore a few blocks away from Hemenway’s does a thriving business in didactic tomes, “inspirational” fiction, the Left Behind series, and greeting cards that feature images of angels or of Jesus.
Cadon has put on a Sade CD, which hits just the right note today. She wonders how Cadon even knows about Sade—her fame was before his time. The twenty-somethings of today—the Cadons and Jadons and Aidens and Braedens—are not likely to know who Sade is. Holly has found that, often as not, young adults are ignorant of Bhopal, do not know who Gorbachev was, and have never heard of The Satanic Verses. And as for the old black-and-white Hollywood films she learned to love when she was working at the Academy archives: not a chance. The younger generation wants action films, movies with computer-generated images like that Silver Surfer thing.
She is of the Matt and Steve and Jeff generation, those who listened not only to Guns N’ Roses but also to Sade. Is it a crime? Oh dear, the CD playing reminds her of a weekend on Padre Island with Reed—the little bistro in the hotel played a lot of Sade. Don’t think about sex, she tells herself. The bell over the door tinkles and she looks up.
The man who enters the shop is Dave, an older guy from Dr. Jane’s suicide survival group. He’s from New York, and Holly found him brassy, even abrasive, until she began to know him better.
Dave approaches the card rack where she stands. “Interesting that you would name a bookstore Hemingway’s,” he says.
She has become accustomed to the fact that Dave seldom offers salutations or greetings, just jumps into conversation in medias res.
“Good morning, Dave,” she says. “Actually, it’s Hemenway’s, not Hemingway’s—Hemenway is my last name.”
He expels a short laugh. “Funny, I never knew your last name. I guess the Suicide Club is like A.A.—we’re all supposed to be anonymous.”
For a moment Holly draws a blank. Oh my gosh, he calls the grief support group the Suicide Club? She is not sure if he is being cynical or just making an offbeat joke, so she wills her expression to remain impassive.
“Do you have the last Chris Hitchens book?” he says.
“You mean God Is Not Great?” she says, keeping her voice fairly low. A couple has just come in, and they are more likely to be looking for The Purpose Driven Life than the Hitchens. As the man and woman come closer, Holly hopes they did not hear her say, “God is not great.” She goes to the back of the store and fetches the Hitchens for Dave, who has followed her to the shelves. She hands him the volume, asking if he needs anything further.
“This ought to do it,” he says. “My wife and I saw someone last night on the Hair Network railing against this book,” Dave adds. “We figure if they hate it, we’ll love it.”
“The Hair Network?” Dave always makes her feel slow, the way most New Yorkers do. What is the Hair Network, she wonders—something like the Hair Club for Men? Dave does have a significant bald spot.
“You know,” Dave says. “One of those Trinity Broadcasting stations—the ones where they preach the ol’ fire-and-brimstone and all the televangelists wear pompadours,” he says. “Lot of black hair dye.”
She cannot help but smile, then turns to wait on the couple, directing Dave to Cadon at the register.
“Going tomorrow night?” Dave says.
The Suicide Club. Yes, she is.
As she drives home from the shop, Holly decides about dinner. She will have what she thinks of as “the modified Atkins”—a porterhouse accompanied by half a bottle of Cabernet. She wishes Teddy would be home to have dinner with her, but, per the joint custody agreement, he is in L.A. with her ex until school starts in the fall. During the year since Reed killed himself, Holly has grown increasingly anxious over custody transfers. Theo now questions her suitability as a parent. Although Teddy was not in the house at the time Reed pulled the trigger, the suicide has made the premises, in Theo’s eyes, a charnel house—far too unsavory an environment for his little boy. When her ex learned of Reed’s suicide, all he said was “It was always clear to me the son-of-a-bitch was no gentleman.” She did not point out to Theo that some of his own consorts have not exactly been cotillion material.
She sneezes sharply and her eyes involuntarily close; the car swerves out of its lane. As she sneezes again, she nearly sideswipes a car with a bumper sticker saying, “A dusty Bible means a dirty life.” She spent some time this afternoon in the stockroom at the shop and is likely sneezing from that particular dust.
Holly has to wonder if Theo might not be correct—maybe Reed’s death has warped Teddy in some way, especially since Reed and her son were buddies from the get-go. She should check into whether there is a suicide survivors group in Hope Springs for children but figures she instead might need to take him to a child psychologist in Tulsa. She has not told Theo about this, but this spring when she took their son to see the film Bambi, Teddy was the only person in the theater—child or adult—who did not shed a tear when Bambi’s mother died. Holly was shaken by his stoicism, which seemed unnatural. But was it the death of a mother that failed to move her child, or was he showing signs of emotional blunting due to the trauma of Reed’s death? She hardly knows which is worse.
Maybe having a whole bottle of wine on hand for tonight might be advisable, she figures—the modified-modified Atkins. But thanks to the nutty blue laws in Oklahoma, she will not be able to pick up a bottle of wine at the grocery store when she buys the porterhouse. She sneezes again, then turns left at the Christian bookstore, parks the car in front of the tribal tobacco outlet, and walks over to the liquor store.
When Holly arrives at Bethel Baptist, where Dr. Jane McAllister holds the Wednesday night suicide-survivors workshop, she sees that she is the last person to arrive and that Dave is already talking. She missed last week’s session, as the sneezing fit after work turned out to be the first sign of a brutal cold. Dr. Jane wears a pale yellow linen suit and is nodding at whatever Dave has just said, and she gives a wink of acknowledgment as Holly enters the room.
“And then my sister was on my case like stank on a monkey,” Dave says.
SueAnn, a forty-something lady whose teenage son killed himself, offers a few examples of her own tussles with relatives after her son’s death, and Dr. Jane reminds everyone that in the wake of tragedy, often the worst comes out in people, and that this is understandable. When the room goes silent, Holly apologizes for being late, and for missing last week’s session.
Dr. Jane inquires, “Are you okay now?”
“My cold’s gone,” Holly says. But she hears her voice crack on the word “gone,” and to her embarrassment, tears form and cling to her lower lashes.
“Is there something wrong, Holly?” Dr. Jane says.
Can she really tell them what has upset her? Almost certainly they will find her narcissistic, and what is bothering her is hardly grief.
“I went to the urgent-care clinic to get some medicine for my sore throat,” she says. “And to make sure I didn’t have bronchitis.” She pauses and watches everyone look inquisitively at her. “The doctor, a man, when he took my history asked me if I were still menstruating.”
“And your age is only …?” SueAnn says.
“Thirty-six.” She instantly feels as if she has Tourette’s, impulsively blurting out, “The dumb bastard.”
“Perhaps that wasn’t very judicious of him,” Dr. Jane says. “When I was in grad school, we were taught never to ask that question—even if the patient were in her seventies. We were told to ask, ‘When was your last period?’”
“I don’t get it,” Dave says, looking genuinely puzzled.
SueAnn says, “Holly don’t look old enough for menopause. And no gal likes being thought of as a dried-up ol’ thing—sure she’s upset!”
Holly feels shamed, not only because the doctor assumed she was old, but also because her reproductive functions are being discussed in a group setting. She uses a longtime coping device, a little internal mantra that she taught herself in elementary school: I’m-not-he
re-now, I’m-not-here-now, I, am, not, here, now. She focuses intently on Dr. Jane’s shoes, channeling all her energy into studying them, homing in on the visual and tuning out the aural. Dr. Jane always looks as if she is dressed for Major Metropolitan, not Hope Springs, Oklahoma. Holly has never seen her wear jeans or polyester blouses or matronly shoes. She suspects Dr. Jane would not ever be caught wearing Birkenstocks as Holly does tonight. Jane is wearing bone T-straps with a three-inch heel and acutely pointed toes.
Only this morning, Holly noticed a Dillard’s shoe-sale advertisement in the newspaper and found herself lingering over the ad. The shoes pictured all had women’s names assigned to the respective styles: high-heeled mules named Rochelle, sandals named Jill, wedges named Norma. Who decided to give shoes women’s names? she wonders. She considers whether a shoe called Holly would be a Birki or a stiletto or a loafer.
She brings herself back into the room and sees that Dave is again speaking. “Yeah, my wife slapped me in the face once when I told her she was acting menopausal.”
Holly arrives home from the shop, carrying groceries into the kitchen. She and Reed bought the house only six months before his death, and though she can no longer sleep in the bedroom that was hers and Reed’s, she does not wish to sell the house.
She and Teddy and Reed’s Irish setter, Joyce, stayed with her mother in the immediate aftermath, and a few days later, when the yellow police tape came down and Holly began to regain some of her equilibrium, she numbly thumbed through the classifieds until she found the heading Crime Scene Restoration. The ad that caught her attention was the one that contained, in large block letters, the promise LIKE IT NEVER HAPPENED!
When she came home from work that terrible day, she had called out the ironic “Honey, I’m home!” that was Reed’s and her habitual greeting, but there was no response, except that Joyce jumped up on her as he always did when Holly came home. “Down, Joyce. Reed?” she called. Nothing. Not seeing Reed in the kitchen or the study where he usually worked, she climbed the stairs to the bedroom.
