Night Swim

by Jessica Keener

  I sat in the hearse with my brothers, Father, Aunt Annette and Uncle Max. A quartet of policemen on motorbikes escorted us through intersections in town and a road that led to the highway.

  Father bunched a handkerchief and shook his face at a spot on his knee. Peter looked out the window. I imagined Mother up front, smelling of perfume and talking gaily as if the next excursion would be the one that would take us out of our troubles, clear away the unhappiness that cluttered our life. I was deep in my capsule with nothing to say and I could tell Robert, who sat beside Elliot, was too. He pulled at a crease in his pants, as if he had been put in this car by mistake and was waiting for someone to figure this out and take him away. He turned to the window and watched the police while Elliot beside me took my hand and cried. Aunt Annette handed him a Kleenex. I listened to his sobs: quiet, gentle gasps. A policeman drove alongside us, directing the hearse driver to turn off the next exit, and then the policeman took off again. Another policeman raced ahead to forge an opening for the procession of cars that trailed us. We all turned our eyes to this motorcycle display, this speed-chasing dance. The zigzagging design distracted me. My brothers watched too. But not Father. Nothing dragged him away from the centrifuge of pain.

  The cemetery looked like a snowbound prairie with a few hedges and occasional tree. Headstones lay flush to the ground, an attempt, I think, to equalize the dead and therefore the living. No one could mount a statue larger than the next. In this place, it was the size of the family plot that mattered. Hedges cordoned off our plot. A canopy had been raised on metal poles.

  The hearse stopped. Father got out first, then the others except for Peter, who waited for me, but I couldn’t move my legs. A crowd gathered outside under the canopy. Elliot and Robert stood beside Father. The rabbi put his arm around my younger brothers, bent over and whispered something to each of them — another adult outside the family, taking charge. Elliot nodded. Robert shook his head. Other cars drove up and parked along the roadways that sketched lines through the flat, white field. Then, Peter turned to me.

  “Coming, Sarah?”

  I looked over at a mound of shoveled dirt and shook my head.

  He moved to close the car door.

  “Don’t shut it,” I said.

  The rabbi looked over at me and nodded.

  Even in this chilled season, I couldn’t think about her without thinking of her roses. The garden lay underground and dormant now, but in summer, Mother’s weather, the roses appeared everywhere — in crystal vases in the front entryway, in single stem vases lined up on the kitchen windowsill like models posing in a fashion magazine. Every other day, she emptied the vases and replenished them.

  “Makes them last twice as long,” she explained.

  Each stem was stripped down to display the lean form of its silhouette against sunlight. And the garden, of course, in full bloom was rife with roses. Bushes and bushes of roses.

  She once told me: When I walk outside in the morning, I feel the plants trembling, bending toward me in greeting.

  All summer long, she passed hours in her wide-brimmed hat kneeling among the thorns, snipping and pruning. Father sat close to the house on a lawn chair as Benny Goodman’s clarinet swan-dived out of his office window. On those warm afternoons she secured her glass of Scotch in a hole she scooped in the soft ground.

  But to me it seemed that roses were meant to fail at every moment. Just as one bush might bloom, another wilted under attacks of bugs tinier than my eye could see except for the damage done. I can only conjecture that this was precisely why my mother adored them.

  I believed she could have won prizes for her flowers if she had tried. Every person who came to the house said so. Such a profusion of roses, including vases of dried buds that stayed all year on display in the downstairs vanity and her bureau top. It got so I couldn’t smell them anymore.

  Occasionally, she made arrangements for the local hospital. For these, she used cakes of green oasis. Her designs, like her style, were spare — not more than eight roses in a vase cut different lengths, with some leafy greens to fill out the spaces.

  “Too many in the vase takes your eye from the individual flower. No rose is the same, you know. They each have character and temperament.”

  Perhaps she was mourning her garden at this time of year. Her flower heads had turned brown, her petals wrinkled as old peoples’ faces. The smell of mulch, those cans and pails of mixtures labeled and shelved in the garage, those bitter odors are all that remained, until another spring.

  ~~~~~

  The officials in black overcoats passed out a sheet of prayers. The rabbi said something about the life of loved ones lived on in spirit and memory. The cantor sang in Hebrew. Then the men from the cemetery went over to the coffin and began lowering it.

  I pulled the door shut and looked out through the window. The rabbi walked over to Father and handed him the shovel. Father punched it into the mound of dirt, then stood at the edge of the hole and let the dirt fall. He fell apart again, wailing. Peter put his arm on Father, who hunched over sobbing grey puffs of cold air into his hands. Max took the shovel and filled it with dirt, dark and crumbling like frozen chocolate cake. He flung the dirt into the hole and then he too collapsed in tears, turning toward Grandpa’s stone, whose grave lay in the same large plot. Annette walked over and touched his arm. Then the rabbi handed Peter the shovel.

  My brother went over to the dirt hill and shoveled deep into the middle, filling the shovel to the brim. He walked to the edge and turned the shovel upside down. When half the dirt clung to the metal, he began shaking it violently to free the dirt. The rabbi came over and gently took the shovel out of Peter’s hand. With Elliot, the rabbi held the handle and helped Elliot push a small clump over the ledge.

  One by one, attendees formed a line behind the mound of dirt and took turns with the shovel. I couldn’t imagine Mother in there. I saw her floating above us, fluttering in a light wind, a shape long and silken as a scarf that stretched over the whole cemetery. In the distance, a few gray clouds worried themselves into one large cloud. I would have liked to join them as they moved toward the horizon to find out where she had gone.

  Chapter Eleven

  Shiva

  The reception and week of shiva, seven days of official mourning, took place at Aunt Annette’s. Father did not want to return home. He said he was ready to put our house on a raft and shove it out to sea.

  The rabbi stood in my aunt’s dining room and led more prayers. Time stepped on my heels. No matter where I stood, in a corner in the living room, in the hall by the coats, in the dining room by the coffee urn, it nudged me to move. By mid-evening, cigarette smoke had filled the room up to my shoulders, absorbing food smells — bagels and lox, cakes and plates of cookies. A large tuna fish platter massacred by forks and spoons.

  Father sat in the living room on a couch as people crowded around him. Some people leaned over to hug him. Others knelt down on the floor for longer talks. Mostly, he cried or let out a groan or a sudden shout that paralyzed the room like a siren in a traffic jam. Everyone stopped talking. Then the noise in the room resumed. Many people, especially the men, came over to me and patted my head as if I were a puppy dog that hadn’t learned to bark. The women stopped and brushed my hair back around my ears, maternal strangers, as if such simple motions could neaten the pain, tuck it away.

  People came in like tides. When the front door opened, I bobbed on sudden currents of cool, quiet air that flew in.

  Neighbors showed up on the second night. The Fineburgs next door. Mickey. Like silent trees, like organisms who share the same sunlight, the same moon at night. Mrs. Janson came by without her daughter.

  “I’m so sorry, Sarah,” she said, making a grim face. She tightened a black shawl around her shoulders.

  I was thinking Mother might want to know about Justine.

  “How’s your daughter?”

  “Just fine, Sarah.” She squeezed my elbow.

  I nod
ded and walked away.

  Aunt Annette kept a large pot of coffee brewing. A caterer refilled trays and trays of pastries. The people who had come to my parents’ parties filed in now in gloomy procession. The women dressed in black suits and dresses. Some wore diamond brooches on their collars, or small, glittering earrings — stylish but not gaudy. Miss Delgarno showed up wearing a turquoise sweater, Mother’s favorite color. She was younger than Mother’s friends and she came alone.

  I disliked the way she took Father’s hand, squeezing it as if she could offer him a measure of solace that no one else could. She tried to do the same to me but I stepped away. This time, I wasn’t serving hors d’oeuvres. I didn’t have to be polite.

  “How are you doing, Sarah?” she asked.

  “Great. What do you think?”

  My rude answer kept her at bay so successfully I employed this new tactic on Uncle Max. He leaned over to kiss me.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  He jerked up as if I had whacked him with a paddle, and though in normal times he might have ventured to tell me to be polite or nice, he accepted this statement and crossed the room to light up a cigar. I couldn’t understand what my aunt saw in him. His lips had turned brown from so many years of cigar stubs melting in his mouth. The putrid smell of cigar smoke penetrated every crease in their house.

  “You have your mother’s eyes,” Mr. Garrison — Shell — said, taking my face in his huge, restaurant-owning hands. Maybe he thought I was a piece of steak. He kissed my cheek then lumbered on toward the bar for a drink but I forgave him. I could tell he was stricken. He had tried to smile but couldn’t. Dora kept a sharp eye on Robert and Elliot and they stayed close to her. Robert kept walking back and forth between rooms, avoiding engagement. I worried that he would explode, kick something before the night finished up. But after a while I understood that his restless moving kept him afloat. Elliot accepted the hugs of strangers. He answered their questions. He nodded. He looked older than all of us at his young age.

  I went into the downstairs bathroom and threw up glasses of ginger ale. I wiped my mouth with a paper hand towel, the kind Mother and her friends used for parties. This one had an “S” printed on the border for Stein. I went to find Peter.

  I think people expected me to cry openly but I didn’t. I was full of tears that surfaced only when I was alone. I didn’t want these people to feel satisfied by my pain. Crying in public would fulfill their expectations of a tragedy — those country club women, the ones with firm thighs, deep summer tans, the ones who laughed loudest at the pool, who clicked their teeth against crystal rims of Martini glasses.

  “Excuse me a moment.”

  Upstairs, I located Peter on my cousin Kenneth’s bed. My brother balanced a pencil and paper on his knee, and was smoking a cigarette.

  “What if Dad sees you?”

  “Fuck if I care.”

  The room was dark except for one small reading light next to the bed and a fat, burning candle set on a plate on the floor.

  “I’d like one,” I said reaching for a cigarette. I wanted to smoke like Mother, become her.

  Peter threw an unopened pack to me and I fondled it. All the times I had opened the top for Mother while she was driving in the car.

  “Honey, there’s a fresh pack in my purse. Can you get it for me? Thank you, sweet.”

  I folded back the cardboard top. Usually, Mother smoked mentholated, extra slim, long cigarettes. I tugged a regular, unfiltered cigarette from the pack and placed it between my lips. Pieces of tobacco fell onto my tongue, bit like bitter salt.

  “When did you start?” Peter asked.

  “Today.”

  I watched Peter suck on the cigarette, then vent the smoke through pursed lips. I tried to do the same and coughed.

  “Don’t swallow it,” he said.

  I tried again, holding the cigarette as Mother did: thrust out between two fingers as if it were a magic wand, a tiny spotlight for showing off her best hand. When the cigarette grew an ash, I went over to the window, opened it and tipped off the end into the winter night air. I leaned over the windowsill and looked down at my aunt’s side yard. A squirrel ran across a branch at my level, twitched and cawed then scurried down a familiar route to the rhododendrons that lined the yard. Old fall leaves clung from branches, stiff and lifeless. The cold turned my breath white.

  When I drew on the cigarette, the ash turned red as burning leaves. I was ten the last time families on our street gathered outside to burn leaves. Air pollution was a new concern. Mrs. Brenwald’s leaves turned black and wet around her car but our leaves rose in big, fluffy humps as Father pushed them into the street, the metal rake scraping against asphalt and sand, pulling our entire front lawn of leaves into his mound.

  Once lit, the pyres spit and popped unruly acorns high as the telephone wires above us. It was only at this time that the children, even the youngest, were allowed to light the ends of sticks. I remembered inserting a twig between my lips, watching the end burn as I was doing now with the cigarette. Peter wasn’t there. He had started a band with two friends and was at the drummer’s house practicing.

  All afternoon I poked at the simmering nest with Mickey Fineburg. Slow afternoon shadows stretched across our yards until we disappeared with the trees and darkness, slowly merging into a single netting of dusk. I puffed on my twig and tried to exhale with finesse, the way Mother did — as if smoke streams were tails of kites that could take me away on a breeze. Mickey’s mother walked out to the street and said, “Be careful what you’re doing, you two. Time to come in.” She stood in a long wool coat and watched for a minute before going back inside.

  Mother didn’t come out that day. She said she didn’t like the cold. I wondered, looking up at her lighted bedroom window. Was it something about us or me that caused her to stay away?

  ~~~~~

  “How long do we have to stay here?” I asked Peter. Still leaning out the window, I saw more headlights driving up the road beaming my way.

  “The rest of the week. Man, this place is swarming.”

  “She knew a lot of people,” I said, thinking of the country club crowd.

  “Yeah. But did they know her?”

  He lit up another cigarette.

  “I’m feeling sick, are you?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  The house made different noises from the clots of people going in and out. The doorbell rang. The telephone rang. Downstairs, a renewed crowd wandered through my aunt’s large living rooms. Cigarette smoke, burned coffee, cherry-filled candies, coffee cakes, damp winter coats all tossed together. I could have leaned out the open window all night, staring at the sky, waiting for the moon. But the fog stole my view. I couldn’t spot a star for all the density in the clouds.

  “I wish we could go home tonight,” I said.

  “I don’t,” Peter said. “It’ll be hell when we do.”

  “It’s hell here.”

  I was sick of listening to those glossy tones of strangers one floor below.

  “Honey, how are you, dear? I’m your mother’s cousin, Margie,” a woman with pearl earrings and a black hat the size of a Frisbee said to me. She bent down and squinted at my face as if my eyes were on display at a jewelry store. Then she touched my arm to further inspect the goods.

  “Father’s in the other room,” I said, stepping around her.

  Downstairs, our neighbor, Mrs. Fineburg, wore the same black coat as that day of the burning leaves. “Take care, Sarah. Take care,” she said, sipping on a cup of black coffee. I wasn’t sure I could. Take care of what? My brothers? Myself? Beside her, Mickey stood mute, inward like a little, lost boy. We were preschoolers when he pulled out his penis and showed me how his urine rose in a smooth arc across our driveway. Ancient memories. At funerals you think of these things and say nothing. What did it matter now? “Have some food, Mrs. Fineburg, we have too much.” I pointed to the buffet of casseroles before walking away.

  I tried to picture mys
elf walking into homeroom, a new person now. A person without a mother. Margaret might steer me to the girls’ room to find out what had happened. What would I say? I didn’t know what Sophie would do, or the teachers. I saw Anthony meet me and walk me to class, then put his arm around my waist as if I were his.

  “Do you think anyone at school knows?” I said, turning from the window.

  “The whole friggin’ town knows. The entire state.”

  I heard someone coming upstairs.

  Kenneth walked in. He looked around as if he expected to see others and when he didn’t he turned and closed the door.

  “What a fucking circus,” he said. He peeled off his black suit jacket and unplugged his tie from his shirt collar. He truly was huge, his head nearly touching the overhead light in the middle of the ceiling. The bedroom seemed to shift when he entered. “I’ve never seen such a collection of bullshit, have you?”

  I always liked Kenneth but now I loved him completely. I turned from the window and went to sit on the bed, to be closer to him. He was one of the few people who spoke honestly and it came naturally to him. People thought him inelegant, the opposite of his brother, Edward. Mother once said it would be nice if he could be more polished. She thought he said things just to be provocative.

  “I really can’t tell where he’s coming from,” she said a few days after one of our seders.

  But I saw that he didn’t have the patience for manners. It confirmed my observation that good behavior offered a way of telling lies. Downstairs was a perfect example. I had observed Miss Delgarno sitting next to Father on the couch as if her new mission in life was to keep vigil, but I suspected her vigil was much more than that.

  “I couldn’t take another minute down there, although I think your mother would be happy so many people showed up,” Kenneth said.

  He pulled out two odd-shaped cigarettes and handed one to Peter.

  Peter struck a match and puffed until the cigarette flared red. He inhaled and held his breath then exhaled a long stream of marijuana smoke.