Such were my thoughts as we motored, inch by inch, toward the university hospitals.
Oscar had been a young man, physically beautiful, and in wonderful condition except for his now-defunct heart. After they were done with the electrical defibrillation, the intubation, the epinephrine, the lidocaine and the procainamide, and the chest compressions, they harvested him. They sold him off for parts, down to the skin and bones. He helped save the lives of others, et cetera, et cetera.
CHLOÉ NEEDED SOMEONE SMART, mean-tempered, and bad-natured to accompany her to the funeral home and to take care of things. I was that person. We had womanly solidarity, Chloé and I. First off, I called Oscar’s father, the Bat. Ah, now there was a charmer. He had a German name, Metzger, though he said his friends called him Mac. I doubted it. Such a name wasn’t plausible. He wouldn’t have had friends. Co-conspirators maybe, but friends, no. I would not call him Mac, as per his request. I asked if he wished to have a hand in the funeral arrangements, and he said he would not. He appeared to be lacking in grief; I couldn’t hear a trace of it in his voice, and his lack of grief managed to enrage me. He, this dreadful example, explained that Chloé had killed his son, at which point I pulled out some of my verbal knives and went to work on him. Some of my meanings went over his dull-normal head, but he was stunned by my vicious eloquence into hostile silence. Then he tried a retort, but, unused to the arts of argumentation, he tripped over himself, and I threatened him again. Things, how shall I put this, had quickly become acrimonious, and I will admit that I finally hung up on the man, who was, judging from his slurred speech, as drunk as a church sexton.
We had better luck with the funeral director. A pleasant enough person, a Mr. Kleinschmidt, broad-shouldered and athletic and a go-getter as most funeral directors are, he took us through the possibilities, and Chloé decided on a closed-casket viewing and a cremation. Then we were ushered into the cavernous casket showroom downstairs. Some of the caskets, particularly the ones with brushed aluminum exteriors, looked like huge kitchen appliances dedicated to obscure purposes. They didn’t appear to be caskets at all. Though I had offered her money for the funeral costs, Chloé didn’t want my money. She was prideful. She made arrangements for installment payments, but I examined every charge that Kleinschmidt put on the bill, down to the dime.
For the closed-casket viewing, Kleinschmidt had something in mind. He walked over to a cherrywood casket and pointed to it. “I can give you something of a bargain on this one,” he said. “But I’ll have to explain something about it.”
“It looks nice,” Chloé said, a bit uncertainly. “What’s the deal?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s used.”
“Used? You mean they buried somebody in it?”
“Oh no,” he said. “We would never do that. No, this is the casket we used last time we had a viewing, prior to the cremation. The body is laid out in it, and then removed and cremated. All the inside cloth and padding is removed — okay? — and replaced. It’s just the wood that’s the same. So it’s not really used, not the way you might think. It’s never been buried.” He waited. “In the ground.”
“I dunno,” Chloe said. “A used casket.” She turned to me. “Diana, whattya think?”
“I think it’s all right,” I said. “I don’t think Oscar would’ve minded.”
“I guess not.”
“Good,” Mr. Kleinschmidt said, “that’s settled. Now we need something for the cremains.”
“The cremains?”
“Well, that’s the word we use. You know. The . . . ashes. The urn.” We followed him to the back of the room, where there was a display of these commodities in an alcove. It looked like a sculpture collection of Bakelite canisters and wooden boxes. One of them was green ceramic of some sort, with a bronze dolphin frolicking on the side.
“Not that one,” Chloé said. “I don’t think Oscar liked dolphins.” She waited. “Well, he never met one.” She pointed. “That one. That’s the one I want.” She had indicated a polished and gleaming mahogany box about a foot and a half in each direction like a knickknack box that happened to be a bit too large for the dresser. “He’d like that one,” she said.
Just about then Chloé’s forehead began to get damp, and she put her hand on my shoulder. Her eyes, which are unusually bright, had gone stoned-or-bored-gauzy. I was about to ask her how she was feeling when her eyes rolled up, and she fainted. I grabbed her around the shoulders in time before she hit the floor.
Kleinschmidt and I managed to haul her upstairs, he carrying her by the shoulders, while I took her legs. It wouldn’t do for Kleinschmidt to carry her alone. We laid Chloé out on the sofa. He pulled out some smelling salts from his desk. “Happens all the time,” he said. “Men and women. You’d be surprised.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I said.
After she came to, she rubbed at her scalp and said, “Hey.” She tried a smile. “Hello, again. Diana, I was just wondering where Oscar was. I guess I was wondering that when I passed out.”
“He’s dead,” I told her. “Oscar died, Chloé.”
“Oh, yeah, I know that. I meant his body. You know: what’s left of him.”
“Downstairs,” Kleinschmidt said. “In the rear of the building.”
“Can I see it?”
“Why don’t you come back after lunch?” Kleinschmidt suggested. “We’d need some time to get it ready.”
“Okay,” Chloe said. “I could eat about a month of cheeseburgers anyway. Gotta keep my strength up, right?”
I took her to a restaurant where, I’m glad to say, she ate like a horse, shoveling it all down, cheeseburgers, fries, salad, and a chocolate malt. She didn’t even stop to talk. “I’m nauseous in the morning but by lunchtime I’m starving,” she said, munching on a ketchup-covered french fry. I liked almost everything about her, including the way she chewed with her mouth open and how she disapproved of the meager dieter’s salad I had ordered. “You could just go outside and eat grass,” she said, pointing at it. “It’d be cheaper. Maybe more nutritious, too, except for the herbicides.” When we returned to the funeral home, she was ushered toward a viewing room. “Want to come along?” she asked me. I said no.
About twenty minutes later, she came back out and said, “Well, that’s done.”
“How’d he look?” I asked her.
“He didn’t look like himself anymore,” she said, working up to a concentrated scowl. “So what I gotta do is, I gotta remember him, instead.”
AFTER THE VIEWING and the cremation, Chloé and Oscar’s friends had a party-wake for the two of them. There was a controlled tumult of drinking and dancing and stories about Oscar. She took the wooden box containing his ashes along, and put it on a shelf near the stereo system. I asked her about drugs. She told me — I was being the starchy big sister — that, pregnant as she was, she wasn’t drinking or smoking anything at the party. She had made a resolution about that. After all, it was Oscar’s baby too she was carrying, and she didn’t want to fuck it up with anything toxic, she wanted it to come out big and strong. Those were her words. Big and strong.
The next time I went back to Jitters for my morning cup of coffee, the box with Oscar’s ashes in it was sitting on the shelf on the back wall, near the signboard listing the varieties of coffees and drinks. That box looked as if it belonged exactly in that spot. There he was, Oscar, a bit more anonymous now, back at Jitters, following his death leave.
Bradley and I had gone back to being wary friends. Whatever had gotten into us, to think that we would be successful partners? It was an embarrassing interlude, our marriage, of which we were both slightly ashamed. Still, we greeted each other with pleasure, those mornings when I came into his shop for coffee, and he was there, the Toad, behind the counter.
Chloé managed her grieving in an absentminded way, but she managed it all the same. She told me that she knew Oscar was dead, but she didn’t believe it. I didn’t ask her what she meant by that, but I should have.
&n
bsp; I DON’T KNOW if David and I will stay together. Our lovemaking is so stormy and theatrical that we keep tearing into each other, and when we do, we tear holes. Sometimes what we do is more like fighting than love. We slam each other around. I think we’re trying to find each other’s souls, knowing they must be in there somewhere, close to our undernourished hearts. You shouldn’t envy us, sexy as we might appear to be. It’s not sustainable. No one could endure it. This intensity can’t continue forever. But it’s the way we are, hard-assed and mean and a bit selfish, and yet the main point to make here is that we’re obsessed with each other and are willing to admit it now, for all the good it does two people like us to be in love, if that’s what it is, which is very little good at all. We probably shouldn’t be in love. Dragons shouldn’t be characters in love stories. We should turn our attention to something else. The orgasms I have with him go up to my shoulders and down my arms and leave me beleaguered for hours afterward. The thing that we create when we’re together is wondrous but certainly not wonderful. I hate the idea of marriage. I hate seeing couples in cars going the other way on the highway. It makes me cringe. I go into rages.
On some days I’d like to be more like Chloé, who has star quality, but I’m not like her, and I won’t be. I’m bad, because I lack usable tenderness and I don’t have a shred of kindness, but I’m not a villain and never have been. That’s what you should remember about me.
TWENTY-FIVE
BEFORE I MET OSCAR, I was fine. But then I met him, and I knew him, and I loved him, and he died, and after that, in an Oscarless world, I couldn’t go back to the way I was before I knew him, because I wasn’t the same person anymore. He mutated me.
First off, I had to do some serious crying. It got me nowhere, but I did it anyway. It felt like work, like building a fence or doing hard labor. I was okay during the day, most days, but I’d wake up crying and go to sleep crying, first in chairs, then in bed. I’d wake up and the pillow was still wet. In the morning I’d cry into my cereal, my tears dropping into the milk. I’d cry in the shower, and then I’d cry at work during my breaks. At home I watched TV and wept all the way through an infomercial for exercise equipment. So I guess I wasn’t okay during the day after all.
It didn’t help that Oscar showed up in my dreams constantly. Talking and jiving, his cap on backward, wearing his wedding ring, he’d go on and on about bands he liked and games he wanted to see, curious about my news just as if nothing special had happened. I kept telling him to get actual, that he’d died, and he’d say, No no, honey, you got it all wrong. Oh, man, look at my hand. And I’d look at his hand that he held out, and I’d grab it, reaching out in dreamtime, doubting him, and it was there all right, but the touch of it, the tight tough skin exactly Oscar’s, would startle me with terror and love, and I’d wake up by myself in my apartment in the dark like a flashlight you’ve just switched on, with the traffic moving on the street outside the window and the headlights lighting the ceiling, and this big broken hole in me that Oscar had left behind, by dying.
Sometimes I’d get mad at him for leaving me behind here in this life on Earth, but that didn’t work either. It was counterkarmic. Okay, I admit it: I only pretend to know about karma. I read in this magazine about it and I made up the rest. I don’t even know what language it comes from. So there I was. All day I was baffled, and all night I was sweating and shivering. Only I wasn’t sick, unless you count being pregnant and abandoned as sick.
It’s funny what being pregnant does for you socially, though. People such as your parents, who couldn’t be bothered calling you up or saying that you were an interesting person, who were alienated from you, suddenly do start calling and showing up as if you were interesting all of a sudden. They found out my whereabouts from my sister and drove forty miles from their home downriver to see me. They brought cooked chicken on a tray.
On this Sunday, my mom came in dressed to the nines, wearing her church dress and plum-colored lipstick and some sort of hair thing tottering on her head, and carrying, like I said, the chicken, which she deposited on the kitchen counter. She shrieked when she saw me as if I was the surprise of the month. “You’re so grown up!” she said. Yes, I was. She planted a kiss on my face and put her hand on my tummy, which you could tell she was dying to do. Then she looked around at our apartment, Oscar’s and mine, and said it was cute, and she took my hand to look at my wedding ring, doing an ooh and an aaah five months late, long long long past the deadline when I could’ve used it, that admiration. She asked me where he had bought it, and I told her truthfully, at the jewelry counter. She nodded wisely.
My dad, Chester, was behind her. I don’t know if I love my mom, but I have loved my dad even when he was angry at me and was a misogynist when he said I was no good. I go back and forth about him.
He’s confused all the time about life and doesn’t pretend to know anything except his job — he works on the line at Ford — and how to fix household appliances and moving-parts things, and he knows sports. With my sister and me, and how to raise us, I think he took his orders from Geraldine, my mom. He would’ve been okay with sons, but with two daughters he was clueless and sweet and so generous it was a compulsion with him. Anyway he was standing there in the doorway as if I hadn’t invited him in, wearing his hat and cleaning his glasses with his shirt flap, very shy and embarrassed about his previous anger toward me. So I said, “Come on inside, Dad,” and he walked in, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him, wearing his sheepish look. A sheepish look on a dad can bring you into a state of startled puzzlement. You could tell he was ashamed. Ashamed that he had once hypercursed me, but mostly ashamed that he had never met Oscar and had taken no interest in my life for the last year or two, because his wife had told him not to. He didn’t even look around at our little apartment. I guess he thought he didn’t have the right to look around. But I’m not squalid. Neither was our apartment. I couldn’t stand it, so I ran over to him and gave him a hug.
My dad smelled of grease and dime-store aftershave. Hugging him, you kind of collide with his stomach before you get to his face, but that was okay. My dad’s stomach is like the foyer to the rest of him.
That Sunday afternoon proceeded in a normal fashion until my mom asked if I had a picture of Oscar. I went to a drawer and pulled out his high school graduation photo, where he’s smiling in a smug way I never saw him smile, and his hair is watered down, and he’s basically pre-me, pre-Chloé, so he doesn’t look like himself, he doesn’t look transformed, except by the drugs he was using right about then. He was a little gaunt in those days, at least in the off-season, away from the track team, feeding his body with drugs. Later, Oscar in love went out of two dimensions into three or four. We made love in the fourth dimension, for example. But anyway this graduation portrait’s the only picture of him I have, except for one of him that Scooter took at our wedding, in which me and Oscar are kissing and Oscar’s got his hand planted on my tits, which I wasn’t going to show to my parents, the picture I mean, for safety’s sake.
“He looks very nice,” my mom said.
“Kinda thin,” my dad said.
No point in telling them about the drugs, so I said, “He’d just had flu.”
They nodded.
They spent the rest of the afternoon with me, making mature efforts to reconcile. We talked about boring stuff like my dad’s job, my mom’s job (she’s sort of a cashier-receptionist at a car dealership), and how the house was empty these days and if I wanted to move back, just before or after the baby was born, I could do that, and I could use the crib for my baby that they used for me. I almost said, “Thanks very much, that’s very sweet, but, you know, it’s too late for that,” but I didn’t, because they were trying to be solid and correct with me, turning over a new parental leaf, now that I was my own woman and not their little girl anymore. Besides, I wanted to show them how mature I’d gotten by not saying fuck all the time, a habit that’s hard to give up. That’s scary for parents. You have to be careful
with parents once you’re grown up into mature adulthood. They get sensitive. Almost anything you say, you hurt their feelings. Their aging hearts get broken. They just crumple up. Besides, I was about to become one of them.
The Feast of Love Page 24
