by Ashley Ream
I took the winding drive past neat rows of tombstones and more green, green grass cut neater than John Waters’s mustache, following the discreet and somber signs to the office, which was marked by an equally discreet and somber sign. A small concrete pad to the side had spots for three cars, all of them empty. I wondered where employees parked.
The building was the same red brick as the guard shack with shiny black shutters and a shiny black door with a gold knocker, which I whacked twice for attention and once again for the fun of it. I was dressed in uniform—paint-splattered jeans and a tank top. It was peacock blue that day. The man who opened the door was also in what was no doubt his uniform—dark suit, white shirt, and discrete and somber tie.
“My name is Clementine Pritchard,” I said. “I have an appointment.”
“Of course.” He held out a too-smooth and soft hand to shake. “I’m Charles Weiner.”
It was Weiner like wee-ner, not wy-ner, which was too bad for him.
“Please come in.”
He held open the door, and I stepped into the waiting room. My foot sank into the mauve carpet up to my ankle. The plush pile was padded from below with enough foam to keep the princess with the pea happy, and someone—possibly Mr. Weiner—had recently vacuumed. The lines were still visible, and the whole room—decorated with dark cherrywood and Japanese prints of cranes—looked clean enough to perform operations.
“We can step into my office,” Mr. Weiner said, already leading me down a short hallway.
I squish, squish, squished in the carpet behind him.
His office was decorated with the same claw-footed cherry furniture as the anteroom with the same mauve carpet and beige walls. No cranes, though. Just a large picture window behind his desk that looked out onto carefully sculpted rolling hills full of dead and rotting corpses.
I took the guest chair.
“How may I serve you today?” Mr. Weiner asked, settling himself in the slightly larger executive seat. He spoke in a low, soothing tone that gave the impression he was used to guests falling to pieces in front of him.
“I want to buy a plot.”
“Is this for a family member?”
“No, it’s for myself.”
He spun silently on the chair’s swivel and selected a brochure from a stack to his right. “It’s very important to plan ahead. I congratulate you. So few people do, and it makes it so much easier on the family when the time comes.”
“I’m going to need it soon.”
He blinked. Perhaps I had stepped outside his cemetery sales training.
“I’m dying,” I clarified. “Soon. So I’m going to need something in a little less than a month.”
He smoothed his discrete and somber tie. “Yes, of course. I’m so sorry to hear that. Illness is always difficult. We will do everything we can to ease the process.”
I appreciated that and said so.
He turned the brochure around to face me on the desk and opened it. The pages were printed on heavy, matte cardstock that made me want to touch it and take it home to add to my materials.
Using a gold mechanical pencil with the lead withdrawn as a pointer, he went quickly through all the special features I could expect as a long-term resident of Stony Brook Cemetery, none of which I expected to be able to appreciate. At the back of the brochure was a map. He used his gold pointer to highlight the areas where there were still vacancies.
I asked if any of the vacancies were on a hill, and he said yes. I asked if any of those were near any trees, and he said yes.
“I’d like to see that one then.”
I followed him back out of the office—squish-squish-squish—and around the building. In back, a white golf cart was parked. I called shotgun, and we rode along the quiet, winding roads deeper into the garden of the dead.
Along the way, we passed a man on a riding mower with a ball cap pulled low over his eyes and a white paper painter’s mask over his nose and mouth. Mr. Weiner used this as a visual aid to go along with his spiel on the excellent maintenance I could expect in my years of decay.
The grounds undulated like the rolling, snakelike back of a dragon, so much so that I began to suspect they’d carved the land that way on purpose. I tried to imagine the sort of equipment that would take but didn’t get very far before we came to a stop on top of one of the dragon-back ridges next to a large tree.
I asked what kind of tree it was.
“Bigleaf maple,” he said, patting the crackled bark. “All of the trees at Stony Brook are native to Southern California, unlike the palm tree. Did you know the palm tree doesn’t naturally grow here?”
“Yep.”
I wandered over a few feet to the very crest of the hill and looked around. We were slightly higher than the other hills, and I could see the wrought-iron and brick-fenced edges of the vast cemetery and the houses and shopping malls beyond its borders, including a new Target under construction. Just below us were the rows of white headstones, denser at a distance and then getting sparser as they approached the hill. I knew from the brochure map that many of those empty spots were spoken for by the not-quite-dead. On my hill there were no headstones at all. Mine would be the first, like the inaugural flag planted on foreign soil.
“I want this spot right here,” I said, pointing down at my work boots.
“It’s a lovely plot. Would you like to come back to the office to sign the papers?”
I didn’t answer for a moment, just took my time looking around at the view from my spot.
“All right then,” I said finally. “Let’s go.”
I wrote the check in full before I left the office and climbed back in my car, but instead of turning right toward the exit, I turned left and wound my way toward the southern and older part of the cemetery. I pulled off onto the shoulder of the black asphalt road, got out, and made my way to another tree, this one a western sycamore with a smoother, lighter bark than my maple.
I stood in front of two matching headstones.
Beloved Mother
Kathleen Pritchard
1944–1985
Beloved Sister
Ramona Pritchard
1974–1985
The stones were a soft gray and two feet tall with straight sides and arched tops. I stood there and looked at the dozen words until they didn’t look like words anymore but ancient, cryptic scratches. Then I got back in the car and drove away.
Aunt Trudy had left the front door unlocked. I opened it and walked along through the entryway and kitchen and out the sliding glass door to the pool, where she was lying on her usual chaise. Her sunglasses were very dark, and I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed. She had a Band-Aid on her nose. The light peach of the plastic contrasted with the dark tan of her skin.
“What happened to your nose?” I said, instead of hello.
“Cancer. Doc cut it off this morning.”
I sat down across from her. Bob was floating on a turquoise inflatable raft in the middle of the pool. His hairless skin looked buffed and polished. He waved, and I waved back.
“Ain’t nothin’ to worry yourself over,” Aunt Trudy said.
I wasn’t worried. Aunt Trudy had been having cancer cut off of her for ten years with no ill effects other than half a dozen scars. The one on her nose would be a doozie.
“You doing what the doctor told you to?”
“Never trust doctors,” she said, swinging her brown, wrinkly legs to the side and getting up from her chair. “All that schooling makes them dumber than an inbred chicken.”
I watched the droopy butt of her swimsuit disappear into the relative dark of the kitchen. It smelled like Banana Boat Dark Tanning Oil even after she’d gone.
Two minutes later she was back and carrying a shoe box that looked forty years old from a brand I’d never heard of.
“Here. Them’s the things I kept separate when we cleaned out your mother’s house. Lord knows why. Must’ve thought they were important at the time.”
I set the box on my knees and took off the lid. The inside smelled like dust and mothballs and old, decaying paper things. On top, folded in half, was my parents’ marriage license from the state of California. I unfolded it and looked at it for a moment. My mother’s handwriting, which I had forgotten I knew, was loopy and feminine, her signature a series of bubbles. My father’s was narrower and leaned hard to the right, as if it was running off the page.
There were other official things: thirty-year-old bank statements for closed accounts, a copy of the title for the car my parents had owned when I was small, my sister’s birth certificate. I looked at each piece and put it in a pile next to me. There were no photos. Not a single one. At the bottom of the box in the corner was a gold band. I picked it up and held it between two fingers.
“Your mother’s wedding ring,” Trudy said. “She wasn’t buried in it, seeing as how she’d stopped wearing it.”
My mother’s hands had been much smaller than mine. I had big hands just like I had big feet. I remember her telling me I was just proportional, which was only a little helpful when I towered not only over the boys but all the female teachers and some of the men, too. I tried to slip it on. The thin gold band wouldn’t go past my second knuckle.
“Too bad you don’t have one of those,” Trudy said.
“I used to.”
I put the ring back in the box and piled the papers neatly on top of it before replacing the lid.
“Like I said, too bad.”
Trudy had liked Richard. Everyone liked Richard. Even I had liked Richard most of the time.
“Trudy, leave that girl alone.”
I hadn’t known Bob was listening.
“I’m just sayin’,” Trudy huffed.
“Well, don’t,” he said, dipping his hands in the water and using them as paddles to make his way to the side nearest the chairs. “She’s big enough to run her own life.”
When Bob got to the edge he held on to the ladder to keep from floating away again. “You trying to find your dad, Clementine?”
Trudy’s head snapped around at that. “Tell me you are not playing in that wasp nest!”
I didn’t look at her. “Trying,” I told Bob.
He nodded, and Trudy made a sound like a strangled chicken.
“Trudy, put a sock in it,” Bob said.
I knew there was a reason I’d always liked him best.
“I didn’t know him very well. I hadn’t been around long when he run off, and we didn’t mix much when he was around.”
Trudy lay back on her chaise and crossed her arms over her crepe paper chest. She was done with us both and preparing herself for the time to say, “I told you so.”
“Mostly,” Bob went on, “he talked a lot about a car club he was involved in.”
“Hooligans,” Trudy interjected.
Bob and I ignored her.
“He loved that car. Not his everyday car, but the hot rod he bought. Pretty sure your mom and him had a row over that.”
“Damn shameful use of money was what it was,” Trudy said. “Him acting like a teenager when he had two kids to support.”
“It was sweet.” Bob let out a low whistle. “’56 T-Bird convertible, canary yellow. He’d take it out to Van Nuys Boulevard and show it off with the rest of the club. They had a name.” He scrunched up his bald forehead while he thought. “Pumas, maybe? Something to do with cats.”
“How do you know all that?” Trudy demanded.
“Me and him went once.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I did so.”
“You did not.”
“Hell, Trudy, it was thirty years ago. You wouldn’t remember what I told you.”
19 Days
“You didn’t call.”
“Got busy.”
“Can I take you to dinner?”
I let the question hang for a minute. I had three dozen magazines spread out across my worktable and a few on the floor. My hand was cramping around the X-Acto knife. I’d been at it for ten hours and had eaten nothing but toast and the last of the orange juice. Chuckles, who’d been sprawled out on top of a stack of three-year-old W magazines, yawned. He opened his jaw so wide I got a direct view of his scaly tongue and deeply ridged palate. He was the only person I’d seen all day, and he wasn’t actually a person.
“Pizza?” I asked.
“Pizza,” he agreed.
“Gribaldi’s?”
“Affirmative.”
“One hour.”
I hung up the phone and capped the pot of glue. I leaned my hip against the table and peeled the thin dried membrane of adhesive from my fingers. It had built up all day like another skin, copying even my fingerprints.
The back of the buffalo was filled in with the lightest human flesh tones I could find in six years’ worth of Vogue magazines, a saddle-shaped spot of filleted Eastern European teenage models. The darker skin for the rest of the back was proving much harder to find. When and if Jenny came back, I’d ask her for more Ebony and Essence magazines. The ones I had were full of skin indistinguishable from that in Vogue. I cut them out, held them up against the buffalo’s back, and then wadded them all up and threw them away. Not enough contrast. Not near enough.
By the time Miles pushed the buzzer downstairs, I was out of the shower and dressed in one of two pairs of jeans I owned not speckled with paint. I pushed the button to let him in, unlocked the front door, and went back into the bathroom. I had been attempting to work the directional nozzle attachment on the blow dryer while holding a brush at the same time, which is really only possible if you happen to be a multi-armed Hindu god. I kept aiming the hot air at my knuckles, which had turned the color of boiled lobsters, and my hair was not appreciably improved. Chuckles, who made no distinction between the blow dryer and the vacuum, was hiding under the bed, and I was considering giving it all up as a bad job.
“Are you almost ready?” Miles called from the entryway.
I turned off the blow dryer, gathered the tortured strands in a clip at the nape of my neck, and smeared cream concealer across the zit still on my chin. It was unreasonable that in my twilight days I should have to deal with clogged pores.
We ordered bottles of cold beer and two small pizzas because there is beauty in a simple pizza margherita, especially if the basil is torn, not chopped, but it’s a fool who argues against the pizza Diablo with spicy sausage and hunks of jalapeño. Sometimes the answer in life is not one or the other but both.
Miles used napkins to dab spicy sausage grease off the piece on his plate, because when you’re not dying you have to do things like that. I, on the other hand, was considering asking for a little straw to suck the pooling neon-orange fat right off the top, sort of the way fancy restaurants sometimes give you straws for marrowbones. Let no meat by-product go unsucked.
Gribaldi’s, staunchly Italian, was on Hollywood Boulevard just at the edge of Thai Town, which only makes sense in Los Angeles. The ethnic neighborhoods had been morphing and joining and morphing again since Wilshire Boulevard was a dirt road. West Hollywood, for example, the once and current home for recent Russian immigrants with their root vegetable diets and black-scarved babushka grandmothers, had now also turned into a gay meat market. The Russians and gays go along side by side with a minimal amount of fuss. I love that about L.A. It’s one of the things no one ever tells you about the place.
So next to the fourth-best place in the city for dry curry and a twenty-four-hour Laundromat was this pizza, which is not an easy thing to find. Good pizza was the only thing other than subways that I missed about New York. Not that I would imply Gribaldi’s was New York–caliber pizza. But it was good for a city that did better with dry curry and borscht and illegal taco trucks and all other things decidedly un-European.
Our table was covered with Magic Marker and ballpoint pen graffiti and even some of the old-fashioned, scratched-in-with-a-car-key kind, which gave you something to read while you chewed. I preferred the phi
losophical scrawls. The one under my beer said, “You are doomed,” which was a good bit funnier than “Janice was here.”
I looked behind me. The to-go line was out the door, and I counted three babies with mohawks, which were the new “it” accessory, displacing nervous Chihuahuas in handbags. Bonus points if your baby wears an ironic T-shirt. A woman in shredded stockings—on purpose, not like her cat went nuts and she didn’t have time to change—bumped into my chair on her way out. Miles was the only person in the place wearing a tie, which in the language of hipsters could’ve made him cool but didn’t quite.
I finished off a slice of Diablo and went for a basil-scented palate cleanser. Miles took a drink of his beer. He was only halfway through and falling behind.
“So when did you decide to buy a cemetery plot?”
It got hard to concentrate on the pure, milky flavor of the dolloped mozzarella.
“Excuse me?”
“I saw you bought a plot and was wondering if there was a reason you decided to do that now. It’s the same cemetery as your mother and sister, isn’t it?”
Anger started in my gut and spread like a Southern California wildfire in August.
“I will kill you. I will kill you and shove your balls down your throat so that you choke on them.”
“Clementine—”
“Don’t you speak to me, you snooping bastard.”
“It was on the kitchen table.”
“Inside my bag inside an envelope, which was sealed!” My voice carried, and people in the to-go line stared.
“I was concerned about you. I was looking to see if you had any medications. I saw the return address on the envelope, and I just thought—”
“Fuck you! Fuck you and that lying bullshit.” A little bit of spit flew out of my mouth and landed on his grease-free pizza. I leaned across the table. “That could’ve been a bill. That could’ve been anything, and whatever it was it wasn’t fucking yours. What else did you do? Count the condoms in my nightstand?”
“I am not your ex-husband.”
“What?”
“I am not your ex-husband.”
“My ex-husband didn’t snoop.”
