Losing Clementine

by Ashley Ream

  “I’m not saying there are no smells,” I said. “I’m just saying smell doesn’t define it.”

  “And when the tide goes out, the beach smells like rotten fish,” his buddy offered.

  They were missing my point.

  “Everybody says the ocean is supposed to smell clean and refreshing,” Richard said.

  “It doesn’t,” the first guy said. “Except sometimes at night. Then it’s okay.”

  I was glad when the cook pushed their order through the window and they moved off. Conversation vultures.

  Our order was up next. We each took our double-layer paper plates loaded with tacos to the salsa bar. I picked the one that looked spiciest and dribbled it across all four of mine, already loaded up with chopped raw onion and cilantro with sliced radishes and a side of lime wedges. Each taco was built on small corn tortillas that, like the plates, were doubled up for better engineering and stability.

  “Cabeza means ‘head,’ you know.”

  “I know,” I said, squeezing my limes and tucking in for a bite of my head taco. Each one was about three bites for a total of twelve bites of heaven. All for under five bucks.

  Richard had ordered carne asada, which is what he always ordered and is fine if you don’t know enough to order the cabeza, which isn’t brain but more like cheek that’s been stewed and stewed until it’s so tender you don’t need teeth. The carne asada is usually tough. My superior taco selection allowed me to save on chewing time.

  “At least I don’t have to feel guilty anymore,” he said.

  “About what?”

  I had a nearly empty plate and was down to eating the bits of fallen meat, which left orange stains on the paper. I chewed on the stray radish slices. Radish was key to a good taco.

  “About us, what we did.”

  I folded my empty plate in half and tossed it into the trash can along with my napkin.

  “Jesus Christ, Richard.”

  “What?”

  “You broke her heart and fucked up her life so you wouldn’t have to feel bad about sleeping with your ex-wife?”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No, she broke up with me. Technically.”

  “You’re such a tool.”

  “What the hell?” He threw up his hand, forgot he was still holding half a taco, and spilled meat and onion across the sidewalk.

  An hour later, we were standing in the showroom of a funeral home the cemetery had recommended. The carpet under our feet was dark teal with heavy, matching drapes, and the wallpaper was a camel color that alternated satin and matte stripes. All the artwork was framed in ornate gold and featured the French Revolution, when presumably coffin sales were way up. The saleswoman, who wore a lady suit and sensible shoes, had gone to fetch brochures and left us alone with a roomful of empty caskets. Some of them were on display racks that tilted at a forty-five-degree angle so you could appreciate the tufted satin and the little pillows that came with them.

  I reached in and tested the cushioning, which really gave Richard the heebie-jeebies.

  “Do you think all this fluffy stuff would be, I don’t know, claustrophobic?”

  “Normal people don’t pick out their own coffins.”

  He was refusing to look directly at them, as though they might become aggressive.

  “Who else is going to do it?” I asked. “You? Besides, it’s part of the package deal.”

  The options boiled down to either metal or wood, with large gradations in price. The steel was economical, but I was leaning toward a bronze finish. You only die once, right? I would, however, probably skip the customizable embroidery on the inside of the lid lining, which felt just a little too much like having your shirts monogrammed.

  He dodged the question. “I don’t think it’s healthy. Have you told your doctor you’re doing this? Aren’t you supposed to be doing positive thinking exercises?”

  “I don’t have a doctor,” I said. “I’ve discontinued treatments.”

  He looked a little as if someone had let the air out of him. “Tiny, you have to try.”

  He hadn’t called me that since we were married and still liked each other. I’d all but forgotten it.

  “I did try.”

  And I had. Boy howdy, had I ever.

  “There has to be something, some experimental treatment in Spain or something.”

  If I’d said there was, he would have, in that moment, picked me up and sprinted to the airport. He would have carried me himself, like a knight on a white horse, which was why I’d married him in the first place. When it had turned out he wasn’t a knight and didn’t have a white horse and that I wasn’t capable of being rescued, we had both been let down.

  “Want to see my plot?” I asked.

  “What plot?”

  “My burial plot.”

  “No!”

  The saleswoman, just coming through the door with the brochures, jumped at the outburst and then pasted on her best conciliatory smile. It looked experienced. Probably more people argued in funeral homes than you would think.

  “Hey,” I asked, “can I lie down in one of these?”

  “Only the ones that are displayed level.”

  “Are you serious?” Richard asked. “Clementine, you are not getting in a casket.”

  I was already kicking off my shoes.

  “It’s one of the benefits of shopping with us,” the saleswoman explained, using the same calm, quiet voice that seemed to pervade the entire death industry. “When you order online, you don’t get the full sensory experience.”

  “You can order online?” Richard’s voice got high and loud.

  “Yes, from Walmart.” She looked as though this saddened her, but I couldn’t tell if it was because of the competition or the fact that you could pick up your loved one’s final resting place along with dog shampoo and a new bathmat on sale for $6.99. “We don’t recommend it.”

  While they talked, I hoisted a leg over the side of the bronze casket I’d been admiring, then pulled the other leg in and scooted down. The lower half of the lid was still closed, so my legs disappeared inside. It was long enough, for which I was grateful. Pants, for example, have always been difficult to get in my size.

  “Get out of there!”

  Richard had turned around.

  “I want to try it.”

  I did want to try it. It felt important. If I didn’t try it, how could I know everything would be okay? That was the point of waiting thirty whole days. Everything would be done. No mess would be left. No one would have to sweep up after me or find me after school with my blood sprayed across the wall. It would be neat. The casket had to fit.

  “Get out.”

  Richard had crossed the distance between us in two steps and wrapped a hand tightly around my bicep. He was stronger than I remembered, or maybe it was just because he’d never done something like this to me while we were married.

  “Get out.”

  He was trying to yank me or lift me, but the angle was against him. The skin on my arm was starting to chafe and burn from the twisting friction, and my upper body was pulling too far to the right considering that my legs were trapped under the lid. If he kept it up, I was going to end up facedown on the floor with two hundred pounds of metal on my back.

  “Richard.”

  “Sir, please,” the saleswoman said.

  We had gone beyond the bounds of normal family funerary disputes.

  “Let go of me!”

  He dropped my arm and stepped back. “Get out. Get out now. I don’t want to see this.”

  And then he turned and walked out, leaving the saleswoman and me alone with the caskets.

  We didn’t talk about it on the way home.

  I borrowed Brandon’s inflatable mattress. Richard put it where the couch used to be.

  We still didn’t talk about it.

  In an unexpected show of loyalty, Chuckles slept with me.

  And we didn’t talk about it.

 
7 Days

  I had one week left to live, and I spent part of it in the security line at LAX. It’s fashionable to hate LAX, much as it’s fashionable to like Wes Anderson movies. I’m unfashionable. I’d stepped past the nun collecting coins for charity, gotten my boarding pass from the automated machine, and shown my ID to the first of several TSA agents, all in under ten minutes. The main downer is that the airport cops ride Segways, and none of them will give you a lift. For their unkindness, the universe makes them wear stupid bike helmets. Feel free to mock.

  It was a three-hour flight to Kansas City, and I spent it watching network sitcom reruns, edited for my protection, on the back of the headrest in front of me.

  Kansas City is not a hub for anywhere or anyone, and when we got off the plane, there seemed to be hardly anyone else there. My fellow passengers quickly dispersed like molecules going into uniform solution, and I was left alone in my own bubble of space.

  I walked outside to grab a taxi. No cars lined the circular drive. No one honked, and no traffic officer attempted to bring order to chaos. A minivan two doors down was discharging a woman and two children, each with a rolling suitcase. A few people walked to the lot across the drive, which was a quarter full. It was twenty degrees hotter than L.A. It was hot the way the Valley gets hot but with the sort of wet, sticky air that attracts mosquitoes. I went back into the air-conditioning, quizzed a middle-aged black man with a mop, and used the courtesy phone to call a taxi.

  It took forty-five minutes to drive into the city, not because of traffic but because the airport is sequestered in the middle of open fields far away from anything. I sat in the back sipping a bottled Sprite I’d bought and waited to see something more than freeway off-ramps and billboards advertising riverboat casinos. When the skyline finally came into view, it was compact, but L.A.’s skyline is compact, too, not like New York’s, so I wasn’t judging. We took an exit and turned away from the biggest and tallest of the buildings.

  The downtown was that particular type of downtown that still has a few cafeterias and owner-operated men’s tailor shops in between FOR RENT signs. The weathered brick and a few art deco signs told you it might have once been a swinging place, and maybe it would be again if enough people decided it was worth doing. It had good bones but also too many broken up sidewalks and chain-link fences that collected Styrofoam trash, too many vacancies and cracked storefront windows held together with tape. People didn’t walk around outside much, which was a shame. Maybe it was the heat.

  The IRS building was massive. It had been a main post office in another life, a building already the size of a train station, with three huge wings built on in addition. Almost thirty acres of accountants, tap-tap-tapping out their calculations, scratch-scratch-scratching out the numbers. Rows and rows and rows of them all the way to the horizon. I imagined them moving in lockstep like a German army of human adding machines.

  When we stopped, the taxi fare was outrageous. I paid it the way you pay auto repair bills, knowing you’re being robbed and impotent to do anything about it. My driver could go home now. He didn’t have to work for the rest of the day.

  I walked inside. It felt surreal going to see my father at work, the way you might if you were a child, which I was the last time he saw me. I don’t know what I had thought would happen when I got in. I think I thought I would simply stop one of the human adding machines and give them my father’s name and be shown to his desk. Row 28, column B in one of the football-field-size adding rooms. But just inside the door was a desk of guards and a metal detector. It looked like airport screening, and I wondered if I should take off my shoes.

  The guards asked me my business, and I told them, leaving out the part where I was unexpected and just how long it had been and that I wouldn’t recognize Jerry Pritchard if we shook hands at a cocktail party. They walked me through the scanner—my second of the day—and searched my bag, which was full of small travel bottles and clean underpants because if you have shampoo and cotton undies you can go anywhere and do anything for an almost unlimited period of time. Then one of the guards looked up the extension to call my dad and tell him I was there.

  Surreal turned to nerves when I realized he could just pick up, listen to what the guard had to say, and deny me admittance. He wouldn’t even have to do it to my face.

  I tried not to sweat watching the guard holding the phone to his ear. He had hands the size of dinner plates with ballet-slipper-pink fingernails on deep dark skin. I waited and he waited and we both waited together, and still he held that phone up to his ear with a hand that nearly swallowed the whole thing, and nobody said anything.

  Then he hung up.

  “Not answering,” he said.

  My heart stopped beating and my lungs stopped expanding and my cells stopped dividing.

  “Lakisha, would you take this lady upstairs to see her daddy, please?”

  I took a breath, and the oxygen was such a shock to my system I felt lightheaded and had to put my hand on the counter.

  Lakisha was doing a crossword puzzle in the newspaper. She put her pen down and pushed away from the desk. “What room?” she asked.

  “Three-oh-two.”

  Lakisha and I walked together through the old post office part of the building. They had left the marble floors and the dark wood and the brass P.O. boxes, which might have been nice if I’d been paying attention. I followed half a step behind my escort and tried very hard to look like a normal person.

  Lakisha and I went up to the third floor and down the hall, and we stopped in front of door 302. She opened it and held it open for me to go in first. The room was not the size of a football field. It was the size of my studio and without any charm of the old P.O. boxes downstairs. It was full of cubicles, all in beige, with walls so high I couldn’t see how many were full, but there was room for no more than ten people.

  I followed Lakisha down the row. She had wide hips and a protruding rear end that rolled when she walked, which was a strange thing to notice at a time like that, but I did. She stopped halfway down and spoke to a woman sitting in her cube. The woman had decorated her space with dream catchers and drawings of Celtic knots and scantily clad fairies.

  “Jerry around?” Lakisha asked, nodding at an empty desk with the chair pushed away and spun around as if it had just been abandoned, perhaps in haste.

  The woman’s nameplate said SUSAN.

  “Yeah. He went to the break room for a candy bar. Should be back soon.”

  Her computer screen was a spreadsheet of numbers. Beside it was a framed photograph of a dog.

  “This is his daughter,” Lakisha said. “I’m gonna leave her here.”

  Susan looked at me in a way that made me think she knew something was wrong and that she might open her mouth and my good luck would be for naught. But she didn’t. She just nodded, and Lakisha walked away, and I smiled with my lips pressed together and stepped over to my dad’s cubicle to wait.

  He didn’t have any personal photographs at his desk. No dream catchers or fairies, either. He had a word-a-day tear-off calendar and a rubber band ball the size of an orange. He was neat. He drank diet soda and brought his lunch in a soft-sided pail with a shoulder strap. Blue. No logo. That was it. That was all the information I had.

  I shoved my hands in my pockets and leaned against the divider and tried not to make eye contact with anyone else while I watched the door. It was quiet. No one was talking on the phone or playing a radio. Keyboards clicked. I felt awkward, as if my limbs had all been attached in the wrong places. I wondered if I should’ve worn a dress and then got mad at myself for feeling like I needed to impress him. I felt clammy. I wished I had something to do.

  I recognized him when he walked in. I didn’t think I would, and I didn’t know if I recognized him or if I recognized something of myself. He was simply familiar. And old. So much older than I was prepared for. He had lost most of his hair, although what remained was still brown. He wore rimless glasses, black dress pants, and a b
lack-and-tan-checked shirt. He shuffled a little when he walked and carried two candy bars in his hand.

  I was staring. How could I not be staring? I don’t know if that’s what pulled him up short, this stranger at his desk staring, or if he, like me, saw something he recognized, but he stopped at the end of the row all the way down from me and stared back. I thought he might run, but he didn’t. He took a glance around and then came toward me with that shuffling gait. He stopped at Susan’s desk and offered her a candy bar.

  “I thought you might want one,” he said to her.

  “Awww, thank you. Hey, you going to introduce us to your daughter? This isn’t the one from California.”

  He looked at me and then away.

  “She lives in California, too. This is Clementine,” he said.

  Susan nodded at me. “Pleased to meet you.”

  I tried to smile but wasn’t sure if I managed it.

  The silence that followed must’ve seemed unbearably awkward and quiet to everyone else, but I couldn’t hear it over my heartbeat.

  Jerry stood there not so far from his chair and looked down at the candy bar in his hands. He tore it open, tore it until the wrapper was split halfway down, and then he broke it in two and offered the top end to me.

  “I don’t know if you like chocolate.”

  I took it. “I like chocolate.”

  “I was just about to go home,” he said. “I like to come in early, so I can beat the traffic.”

  This was it, I thought, the part where he runs. Here’s some candy. Have a nice life. My stomach spun like a washing machine, and I tried to prepare myself for it. I told myself it would be easier now that I was an adult, but I knew that wasn’t true.

  “Do you want to come home with me?” he asked.

  I almost didn’t hear him. I was so wrapped up in the script I was writing in my head. His deviation made me stutter.

  “Yeah, okay, yeah.”

  “Okay,” he agreed and nodded, looking at his chair. “I should call Charlene and tell her you’re coming.”

  Charlene. I tasted the name on my tongue.

  He picked up his phone and pushed a button for a line before dialing. Charlene picked up quickly.