As we stood with our heads bowed, chanting the prayer, the room’s thick air was cut suddenly by a loud aggressive double chirp, followed by what sounded like a Casio preset mamba beat. PLURRP PLURRP . . . chit-chit . . . da-da-da-da—chit . . . PLURRP PLURRP . . . chit-chit—da-da-da-da—chit . . .
Popple Tone. Verizon, 2011.
My cell phone.
I’d turned it on—for the first time in months—to call my seventeen-year-old son, who was on his way here. It was somewhere . . . in my messenger bag? Ringing. Where? Where was it? Under one of those chairs. Somewhere behind me. A hard hot flush ran through me. I tried to jump backward, had to climb over a chair in the cramped room as everyone paused, raising their heads from the prayer, scowling, confused.
“Turn it off,” Gina hissed.
“I’m trying!”
I wanted to blame her for buying it for me in the first place, but this wasn’t the time. I bent and reached under a chair, fumbling through the front pocket of the floppy canvas bag as the clicky drumbeat continued inside. Finally fishing it out, I punched at the keypad to answer.
“Dad?”
“Evan? We’re praying.”
“I can’t find the room.”
I edged for the door, awkwardly waved for everyone to continue, and slipped into the hallway. Our son was at the main entrance and didn’t know where to go. I told him the room number, the color of the elevator to take, which way to turn off the hallway. I told him to hurry.
And then I realized that I was, for the moment, free. I was not in that room. I didn’t have to go back. Not yet, anyway. Maybe not at all. There was no rule, no protocol, no precedent. I could stay here by the nurses’ station, leave everyone else inside with the praying priest, claim that I was waiting for my son. It was late morning, and I was tired and wired. The sun, now fully awake and pouring through the window into the waiting area before me, reannounced a world outside that room. It was morning; it was summer. Summer was my mother in her seventies peroxide phase, when she couldn’t go in the swimming pool with us, turning her lament into a singalong: “My hair turns green in—chlor-ine!” Summer was oatmeal packets eaten dry when she was off at her college classes, finishing her teaching degree. It was dusk on the patio, her with her gin martini, as we threw stones into the sky to watch the city bats come harrowing down at us. Summer was the delivered mail, the last Scholastic Book Club order of the year: Captain Ecology: Pollution Fighter for me; To Kill a Mockingbird for her. Summer was Ohio sweet corn, which she ate with such pleasure that it made our lips move involuntarily in mimicry of hers, a primal sharing.
I lingered. Evan arrived, hurrying down the hall, and then he and I went in together. The group prayer was ending. The clergyman was crying. So was my dad. We said the Gloria Patri together—as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be world without end amen—and then the man in the suit took a step backward, cast us a blessing, and departed. The door closed.
She clenched the next stone in her throat.
In her stubborn, single-minded way—traits she passed directly to me—she continued, and now it was hard to tell if she was staving it off or urging it to come. All her praying and preparing and acceptance and regret clenched itself into the next inhale, which hung there again, the way curls of the sea will freeze in the winter just as they’re about to crash, suspended, suspended. Maybe she had willed herself toward this end, and maybe this was some manner of control. She had us all here. Evan had arrived, and now we were complete, the people I know she would have wanted at her side. Maybe she really was prepared, more than I thought. She’d said her rosary. She’d gathered her people.
And then an open space. And then another staggered bead. And then—
It hung, suspended, between us.
If there was a surprise, it was the odd beauty of it, sharing in the death of our center.
A quiet concentration moved each of us to a slight alteration of form, slumping shoulders, dropping heads, useless hands, drifting out of her orbit.
8: SLOW RETURN
* * *
I saw him coming across the street, dressed for going out, carrying two brown shopping bags. Even from that distance, even with the still unfamiliar slenderness of his frame, he looked the most complete I’d seen him in a very long time. The most like himself. My dad was sitting with Gina and me in the sunroom of our rambling old house, the doors and French windows open, a warm breeze pushing through the muggy late afternoon. It had been in the nineties at the peak of the day, the funeral hours. We’d changed out of our church clothes, and the family had begun arriving. Trays of food were set out in the kitchen and here, on the round glass table in the sunroom. My dad, exhausted and subdued, was sipping a cold beer from the glass I always served his beer in, an old draft glass from Germany printed with the blue logo: BBK, short for Bayerische Brauerei Kaiserslautern, a beer the Germans call “piss brau.”
As he approached the arched door that opened to a front patio, I could see even in his carriage the John I knew so well, the look of him having already handled everything, having predicted and solved problems that hadn’t yet occurred. He’d been the first to offer help when the news of my mother’s death went out, but not in the usual “If there’s anything I can do” manner. Instead, he knew we’d need printed programs for the funeral, and so his questions were not about what he could do but what he was already doing: how many copies did I need, and did I have a good jpeg of her photo, and when did I want to meet at his office to put it all together? I’d shown up on Sunday afternoon with a ream of pale blue paper, and we’d sat in his quirkily cluttered office, walls of corrugated steel, action figures and rubber stamps on the desktop, doing what we’d done so many times before, piecing together a handmade publication. What is a funeral program, after all, but a fanzine for the dead?
I opened the door as he approached. He’d been at the funeral earlier in the day, in a suit, but now he was dressed for going out. John was a connoisseur of sneakers and funky wristwatches, and his orange Pumas were paired carefully with a tangerine Swatch.
“I just stopped to drop some things off,” he said. “I’m not staying.”
I invited him in. I was glad he was here. He’d always been, for me and Gina both, as close to family as anyone who was not actual family. Early on the morning after our daughter, Lia, was born, when I was back home catching a few hours of sleep, he’d stopped at the hospital to see the baby. He sat holding her as Gina lay there in the exhausted post-delivery tangle of hair and gown ties and ID bands. The nurse stopped in and looked first at Gina, then at him. “Did Dad get some rest last night?”
They both smiled. Neither corrected her. “Yeah. I’m good,” John said.
* * *
We went through the house to the kitchen. John set the bags on the counter. From one, he pulled a bottle of Jameson. From the other, two bottles of red wine.
“Stay and eat,” I said. “There’s tons of food here. No one can eat this much ham.”
“That’s okay. I’m meeting someone.”
“A girl?”
“Two, actually.”
John had an uncanny talent for choosing women who were entirely wrong for him, and his inherent generosity only exacerbated this weakness. For someone so careful about planning, he was reckless in such matters. A few years before, he had relentlessly pursued a beautiful Egyptian bartender named Amina.
“Last name: Business,” he proclaimed. “Amina Business.”
It didn’t work out. It never did. But it did result in an enduring term in our shared language.
“Okay, so you’ve got Amina business tonight. But you have to have something,” I insisted.
“I’ll have a glass of wine. In honor of your mom.”
“Really?” I said.
John had not taken a sip of alcohol since his diagnosis over a year before. I opened the bottle, poured him a glass, and poured a glass for myself. We returned to the solarium, where my dad sat.
John raised his gl
ass. “To Donna,” he said. “Salute.”
He sat with us for a while, then he dissolved through the screen door into the waning light, back into a version of the life we’d known.
* * *
My dad mourned mostly in private. I know there was emptiness, he allowed as much, told us that he talked sometimes to the woman who was no longer there. But emptiness is a relative thing in a house she’d filled with a lifetime of accumulation. She’d left him something to do, which was a kind of gift, allowing him to take charge. He began first by emptying closets, sorting through the rosaries, having jewelry appraised, donating formal coats and outdated gowns to the theater department at my kids’ school. He worked hard to sort out a complicated life—my mother would make claims that, for instance, she could live off the land, then she would buy an unwieldy stack of books about living the simple life. Projects, though, are how my dad makes meaning and how he moves forward in his life, one all-consuming endeavor feathering into the next and the next, a process that has defined him since I’ve known him, a perpetual motion.
In the early months of this work, he called to ask if I wanted to take custody of the twenty blue volumes of my mother’s Oxford English Dictionary. Did I want those books? Hell yes, I wanted those books. I made the trek to his house on a cold, ugly Sunday afternoon in the fall and loaded the heavy volumes into the back of my car, driving them to my office at the University of Akron, where I teach creative writing. Employing the dolly I normally used to move barn stones and heavy furniture, I rolled the books in batches into the elevator and up to the English department, where this collection would qualify me as a bona fide academic badass. (The guy in the next office had only the two-volume abridged version of the OED. And he was a Shakespearean!) The top shelf was the only place they’d fit, being oversize, and I had to climb onto a chair and then the desk in order to shelve them.
And then there they stood, lined up like an honor guard, greeting me each day when I went in to teach, a welcome connection.
One afternoon, remembering the conversation from what now seemed like a very long time ago, I climbed onto the desktop and pulled down Vol. III. I looked up the entry and spent some time with it, finding many interesting bits about the word “casket,” mainly that the United States is the only country where it’s routinely used in place of “coffin,” which has a much longer and richer meaning as “the box or chest in which a corpse is enclosed for burial,” but which, I think, we Americans avoid because “coffin” seems morbid, too close to a truth we’d prefer to soften.
What I found mostly was that I instinctively wanted to share this information with my mother, that these were facts she would have found interesting. Language and reading were the closest bonds we shared. When I was around twelve, she gave me her copy of J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories and explained that she didn’t think I was ready for it, and that she didn’t even necessarily approve of my reading it (partly, I would soon determine, for its liberal use of low-grade profanity), but that she thought I should read it, all of which made me feel very special and also somewhat lost in her mystery. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” to this day exists like a secret between me and the woman in the White Bedroom. I love the stories from that book perhaps more than any stories I’ve ever read, but I have never bought my own copy, because the precise value they hold for me can be contained only in the copy that was still on my mother’s shelf. It was how I made sense of her.
And so it seemed that in the complicated story of my mother’s OED—and my mother herself—the appropriate ending would find them shelved here, in the office where I am defined by the written word. That this is where they belong.
But it isn’t. They belong back home, with her.
PART 2
* * *
9: MEASURE TWICE; CUT ONCE
* * *
I lay on my back on the coarse outdoor carpeting of my father’s porch, legs fully extended, feet together, arms bent, crossed wrists resting against my belt buckle.
My dad stood over me with a tape measure.
I squirmed, adjusting my torso until my shoulders felt natural and my elbows felt like they didn’t need to extend any farther. This was important. The widest point of a corpse at funeral rest is the elbow-to-elbow span. The maximum width is twenty-five inches. Everything needs to fit, like Russian nesting dolls—body in box, box in vault, vault in hole. But first I needed to feel like I was resting comfortably so that one day my lifeless body could be repositioned to appear as though I were resting comfortably, even though the notion of comfort at that point in one’s existence seems impertinent.
I held still. He positioned the end of the tape parallel with the bottoms of my feet and fed it out carefully as he stepped backward alongside me, as though measuring a wall space for a new love seat. At the end, he placed his thumb where the tape coincided with the top of my head. “We’ll call it seventy inches, give or take,” he said, and penciled the measurement onto his drawing pad.
Then he extended the tape again, measuring from my right elbow. Holding the center point tight against my sternum, he drew his index finger across to my left elbow and eyeballed the measurement. “Hmmm. We can squeeze you in at twenty-three inches.”
“Really?” I said. “That’s pretty close to the limit. How would an extra-large body ever fit?”
I’m not that big—five-nine, medium build. But months before, when Paul Hummel had measured a standard casket to help me with dimensions, the numbers he gave suggested a space that wouldn’t seem to accommodate a body much larger than mine.
“Twenty-three inches,” my father repeated. “That’s what it says.”
I held my position. “Let’s do it once more,” I said, keeping my neck stiff, continuing to stare upward. “This is definitely a measure twice/cut once situation.”
Lying like this—rigid, formal, so unmistakably in the traditional posture of a resting corpse—I couldn’t help but feel like Barnabas Collins snoozing in the daytime or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins taking the stage. My voice wanted to drop an octave and go, “Gooood eeeev-en-ing . . .” In assuming the death posture on my father’s porch floor, I had unwittingly entered the creepiness that everybody pointed out whenever I mentioned I was building my coffin. I could hardly blame them. It felt creepy to me.
An unusual cultural trend has been emerging, particularly in Puerto Rico but increasingly throughout the greater United States, of corpses being displayed in elaborate poses, like life-size dioramas. A New York Times article (awesomely titled “Rite of the Sitting Dead”) featured a photograph of a deceased boxer in his gloves and silk robe, propped up in a boxing ring, and another of a woman in sunglasses seated at a table, a cigarette perched between the dead fingers of her left hand, with the fingers of the right clutching the stem of a full wineglass. A can of Busch beer and a couple of toy New Orleans Saints helmets rested on the table, with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a wide-screen TV on a shelf behind her.
An executive at a San Juan funeral home that had arranged several of these conceptual viewings explained in the article, “The family literally suffers less, because they see their loved one in a way that would have made them happy—they see them in a way in which they still look alive.”
The casket pose, on the other hand, carries only one message.
In the long months following the loss of my mother, I was thinking in an entirely new way about a lot of things, especially death. Losing a parent made the concept of mortality less abstract, more real. The sharpness of the pain also delivered a new kind of clarity about this great mystery, but instead of turning that clarity on myself, I turned it on my father. His mortality became urgent to me; I obsessed about it privately, clenching with worry every time the phone rang, constantly working out his age in my mind, the fact that he was seven years older than my mother, that he was increasingly older than most of the listings in the daily obituary pages, a part of the newspaper I had never read before but began to with greater attention. But for some reason,
despite my current posture, I could not envision my own body as a corpse.
Nevertheless, my growing awareness of my father’s mortality made my time with him all the more precious and all the more urgent. So I’d begun pressing for us to get this casket project moving forward.
He, on the other hand, made it harder than it might seem. In the wake of my mother’s death, his private grief had slowly given way to a greater engagement with his family and the world outside the home they’d shared. He was traipsing off to football games with my brothers, having dinner out with anyone who asked, spending long hours finishing the work on Louis’s basement bar. In this resurgence, he began to seem like the most alive person I knew. When our high school alma mater went to the football state championship in November, my two brothers and our dad and I made a road trip to the game, joining a raucous tailgate party that ended with me giving my dad victory piggyback rides through the crowd, spilling beer and high-fiving and laughing so hard it hurt. It was the first time I’d seen him truly happy since summer. In the following weeks, he planned and prepared an ambitious, sprawling post-holiday cocktail party with hors d’oeuvres, dips, grilled chicken, cheeses, and desserts, all of which he prepared himself, the first time that house in the country had ever seen such a thing. He seemed to deliberately confront the fact that he didn’t have a single day to waste. He grieved for sure, but he did so a lot better than I did.
This was something like a third act for him. First came his bachelorhood, which he’d enjoyed to its fullest, sailboating and skiing and gallivanting through German beer gardens. Then, after marrying at age thirty, he enjoyed a long and full domestic life with my mother. As her health declined, my mother maintained that she wanted to live long enough to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, which she did, just two months before she died. And now he was alone and finding his way anew.
Furnishing Eternity Page 6
