by Laura Newman
Steven set us up at a mortuary. Piper and I were headed over when Mariam called. “I need to see Ben; I just need to do it.” She lives in Portland, a nine-hour drive if she can hold her pee.
“You don’t want to do that, Mariam,” said Piper. “He had a heart attack and they did an autopsy.” Piper’s a badass emergency nurse and Steven does triage from a helicopter. When Steven wears his flight suit around town people thank him for his service and give him things like free oil changes.
“I have to see my boy,” said Mariam. Sadness so sad, her heart a bug caught in amber.
And I could understand that. “Okay, Mariam, I’ll ask them what it takes and call you back.”
Piper and I sat with Morticia; I never did remember her name. Could there be a worse job? Well, I guess shoveling the body into the box was worse. I expected Morticia to be slack-handed and gratuitous but actually she was quite normal and nice. She probably had a name like Lisa. She addressed her questions to Piper—the true next of kin. I was just the checkbook. $1,300. I said no to all the extras. Piper didn’t care.
We went out to the car to get the clothes Piper brought. “You’re going to bury him in the wedding suit?” I asked, looking into the bag. I hadn’t known until that moment.
“He told me to,” she said. She told me about ironing her dad’s last shirt. She looked like a mudslide about to happen. I would have followed her down.
I rescued the tie, pocket square, and socks from the bag. All in bright colors. Things Ben had picked out. “Could we give these to Jude to wear at the wedding?” She nodded yes. Jude was taking Ben’s place and walking her down the aisle. I found a pair of boxers in the bag.
“No one wants to be buried commando,” said Piper, squaring up, stepping back from the edge.
Morticia looked in the bag and handed us back the shoes. They don’t burn shoes. “We don’t actually put the clothes on the body. We just lay them on top. It’s $450 extra to dress the body and make it presentable for viewing.” I looked at Piper.
This is something that I know. If Piper died, she wouldn’t go in the box naked and have clothes put on top of her. And I wouldn’t let anyone else dress her. I would do it myself. I found I understood how Mariam felt.
I thought of a night, so many nights ago, when Ben fell asleep on the couch and I came out to get him. He had beautiful skin. The moon was coming through the window, but his skin was the candle in the dark. The blanket had arranged itself in a twisted way exposing his body as if he were a model in repose for a classically trained painter. His missing arm, his flat stomach, breath rising, falling. I wished I had the nerve to ask Morticia how much extra for me to dress him. Then I snapped out of it.
I went outside and called Mariam. “Hi.” I skipped the How are you doings. “It’s $1,300 to have Ben cremated and $450 to make him presentable to view. I’m paying the $1,300.” This is where Mariam is supposed to remember that I am the ex-wife. That I have no obligation to pay for anything and she jumps in and offers to help. I pause. No? Okay, I go on. “But I’m not willing to pay more. Do you want to pay the $450 to have him dressed?”
Silence. The next person who talks loses.
“I’m feeling better now,” said Mariam. The cow. I’d pay $4,500 to make sure Piper was dressed. But even as I thought it, I knew I was harsh; her response was tied to her income.
Piper didn’t blink when I said we were fine with the standard deal. Then Morticia brought out Ben’s arm and laid it on the table. They don’t burn prosthetics either. Good Christ.
A Bit More About the Arm
The tattoos are hula girls. Pinks and greens. A tiki torch. I think Ben used Tommy Bahama shirts for his patterns.
On our first date I reached across the table and ran a finger up a florid hibiscus. “What’s the story?”
“I was born without it.” My fingers dropped back to the cold hook, pressed my fingerprint onto the metal.
“That’s sad.” But reasonable, certainly believable.
“You don’t miss what you never had.”
“I like the tattoos.”
We kept dating. Eventually the family albums came out. Thanksgiving. Baby Ben at the beach, two arms reaching up as if the sun were his to keep. I flipped him the stink eye. He countered with the bad-liar shrug. Later that night he said, “Frostbite.”
Just because I was sleeping with him didn’t mean I owned his past. But everyone knows the past is never past. It isn’t even over.
What Really Happened to the Arm
How to explain Sand Mountain? Imagine an ancient Gargantuan fills his hourglass with the sands of time from the eternal Sahara. The sand is as fine as silk, almost the feeling of water in his hands. The Gargantuan goes to visit his auntie to take her this exquisite gift—an egg timer. His auntie meets up with him in what will later be named Nevada and she loves the gift! But the hourglass slips through her gnarled fingers and shatters on the harsh earth. Two miles of sand dunes rise six hundred feet in the air, completely incongruous with the low pinyon pine and the borax washes of the high desert that surround it. The dunes appear out of thin air, a mirage, a broken hourglass, all of Time poured out.
Seriously, Sand Mountain is so out of place it seems a faerie tale. And it is extraordinary, one of only thirty-five places in the world with documented singing sands. When the sand moves, it sings, it whistles and barks, booms and roars. It gives voice to the desert and to Lake Lahontan, which gave up the ghost of water nine thousand years ago, the prevailing winds prevailing upon the remaining sand of the exposed lake bed to Rise up, Brothers! and make the dunes.
If the prehistoric beasties are willing to talk, should we not sit still and listen? Just turn off the radio and shut up. But no. It’s an off-road wonderland. No glass allowed, that’s the only restriction. When the wind blows and the dunes whisper secrets, all that will be heard is the sound of two-stroke engines fucking it up.
Mariam and Pete took their children, Ben and Angie, out to Sand Mountain. Really Pete was drunk before they got there because he was always drunk, it was just a question of how much. Today, too much. Pete put seven-year-old Ben in the ATV with him and headed straight up the mountain.
“I remember being afraid,” Ben finally told me. “When we got toward the top we were so vertical I remember thinking the sand would pour over and bury us. We were digging in deep and there was a wake of sand behind us. Dad had on goggles, but I didn’t and the sand was needling my eyes. My eyes were watering and I saw nothing but the color gold and I thought we were burrowing into the mountain, rather than going up. I had the strangest feeling. And then Dad flung the ATV over the crest of the dune, full speed, and we went out into the air, as if we could fly, and for a moment I thought we could. But as the ATV stopped flying and started to come back to earth Dad fell sideways into me and his body pushed me out. I don’t know what happened. My arm landed under the ATV.
You would think the sand would be soft, no? But it’s not. It’s as hard as a chopping block. My forearm looked like steak tartare.
Did you know there’s a butterfly out there—the Sand Mountain Blue? It’s the only place in the world it lives. Right before I passed out one landed on my chest.”
We never talked of it again. But about a year after he fessed up we drove out to Sand Mountain, arriving as the sun was on the wane. I saw three of the Blues flying in a little vortex pattern, wings like geisha fans. We waited until all the off-road vehicles had departed with their throaty, juvenile roars. We waited for the singing sands to come out with the stars, we listened to the creaking old song. We hiked the dunes by moonlight and went where the prevailing wind told us to go.
How the fuck can a mother stay with a father who’s a drunk? Pete died relatively young, but it wasn’t until after Angie and Ben were adults. She never left him. What was it about my destiny that kept this critical piece of information from me until it was too late, un
til I was already in love with the beautiful one-armed boy? How could I have expected him to know how to be a good husband, a good father? He knew more about hiding in the closet than he did about one-two-buckle-my-shoe.
When Ben started drinking Tequila Sunrises with the sunrise, like they were in cahoots, I was out. He could live inside the lyrics of a George Thorogood song if he wanted, but I was out.
Morticia was looking at us. Business was done; it was time to go. I always liked that damn arm. I picked it up and tossed it in the trunk of the car. Piper and I went home.
Three Days Before the Wedding
Debbi called. “Why don’t you let off some doves in Ben’s name after the ceremony? Then he’ll be part of the day.”
“Nice. But then I’d have to give everyone guns to shoot the doves, because Ben never saw a dove that didn’t look like dinner,” I said. “And it’s not his funeral. It’s not about him.”
Piper called. We were waiting for Jude; he was driving home. “I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t want Dad talked about at the wedding. I can’t be, ‘Oh, you look so beautiful, congratulations. I’m sorry about your Dad.’ I can’t go back and forth like that.”
“If you do that you’ll crack your makeup from going up-smile, down-smile,” I agreed.
“Well, yeah, but I was thinking more about my emotions,” she said.
“Oops.”
Angie called, “What are you doing with Ben’s arm?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I think I’d like to keep it. I feel it belongs to me. He used to throw it at me when we were kids.”
He used to throw it at me when we were fighting. Here it comes. People are going to start claiming things. “I burned it up with his body.” Nothing belongs to anyone except Piper and Jude. And maybe me.
Mariam called. “I heard you and the kids are cleaning out Ben’s apartment tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“Why so soon?”
“Well, because Piper and Steven are going on their honeymoon for two weeks and I don’t want them to come back to that. And because Jude is coming up now and goes home right after the wedding and I don’t know when he’ll be back. So this is the time that everyone is here to get it done,” I said.
“I can be there in a few weeks. I’d like to go through some of his stuff.”
“Mariam, that’s not going to happen. The kids are going to take what they want and the rest is going to the dump. His rent is due in a week. If you want to pay it, I’ll lock the door and you can go through what the kids don’t take. I’m not paying his rent.”
“It just feels like you’re sending his life to Goodwill,” Mariam said.
She did not offer to pay the rent. “I don’t care. I don’t care about anyone but Piper and Jude. This is what works for us and this is what we are going to do.” Did she honestly think I should pay the rent to wait for her? Did this woman forget that I hate her?
“Will you keep his pillow and one of his shirts for me?”
She had just lost her son.”Yes.”
Really it wasn’t my best day.
Two Days Before the Wedding
Jude, Piper and I drove over to Ben’s house with a truck and two cars. We didn’t know what we would find; none of us had ever been there. It was in a sort of compound of 1940s bungalows built around a common driveway. Sears siding and asphalt shingle roofs, scruffy paint. Inside were arched doorways and built-in nooks. A small, rusty pull-down ironing board attached to the wall in the kitchen. Front room, kitchen, one bedroom, bathroom. It was relatively clean.
How invasive to go through someone’s belongings when they didn’t have a chance to curate, to leave out the proper things, set up the story. They say dead men tell no tales, but their stuff does. His weed and pipe were by the stove, a bottle of Jack on the shelf above, right next to the salt and pepper. A steak in the fridge, a little past its prime, but who isn’t. His bed was made. We found letters and photos of the kids, cards and artwork they had sent him, Father’s Day cards and bills and IRS notices. This is your final notice! Damn straight on that one.
We found the old coat from Alaska with the fur-trimmed hood and his Carhartts and fishing poles, Indian axes, scrimshaw knives, a turkey warbler. We found one thousand pieces of the puzzle but we couldn’t assemble it. We only pulled it apart. When we were done packing up there wasn’t enough left for anyone to pay the rent on.
I looked around the sad artifacts and suddenly I wanted to smudge his house. I wished for sage and twine and to open all the windows and set Ben’s spirit free. It seemed the holiest thing to do in the wreckage of this ransacked space. By his reading chair was an ashtray and a carton of little cigarillos, two-to-a-pack in red-and-white packaging. We went room to room, opening windows, except those held fast by layers of old paint. Smudging Ben’s home with smoldering cigarillos.
Swisher Sweets.
Ben would have liked that; I know he would.
One Day Before the Wedding
One of Jude’s reactions, or actions, to his father’s death was to get a tattoo on his back. The Ouija Board. The sun, the moon, the alphabet, the numbers, Good Bye at the bottom. It took up half his back. What the hell was that about?
Day of the Wedding
Piper was as beautiful as a bright idea presented in lace and tulle. When Piper took Jude’s arm the three of us believed Ben was with us; if it’s true that he can be, he was. And then we mostly forgot about him. For the whole day every time I opened my mouth bubbles came out, I was spreading bubbles everywhere. Piper was marrying the right man and they married in my garden with the stream and the granite bridge, the Japanese lanterns, and Japanese maples, passionately red. Winks of gold and orange koi. Debbi said, “You gardened seventeen years for this day,” and in that moment that felt true.
The band had asked us if we wanted them to play any special songs. Secretly I asked for Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” It is Piper’s and my song. When the band started “Landslide” I went and got Piper, and Jude came too and we danced together. Yes, I was drunk. The café lights were just now coming on and the twinkle lights in the stream, just like I’d planned, looking like fallen stars. Color everywhere, and all the people we love and a soft current of goodwill that hinted of gardenias.
Partway through the dance Jude said, “We talked about it, Mom, and we’re glad it was Dad who died and not you. It would be so much worse if it was you.” Piper was agreeing. “We’re giving it to you. We love you more.”
I might like to think that the better part of me would have spoken up for their dad. But I didn’t. It was the best dance of my life. There will be none better.
A Last Bit About the Arm
It’s in the trunk of my car. I don’t bring it in the house, but it goes with me wherever I go. Every once in a while I let a bag boy bring my groceries out just to watch his face when he sees the detached arm, the hook and hula girls, when I open the trunk. Freaks ‘em every time.
Sweet Nothings
Gómez has a date with destiny in the syrup aisle. Chuy is carrying Jesus on his back through the traffic lanes at the San Ysidro border crossing. The gun is in the lake.
In the mornings Gómez liked to pour himself a good strong cup of coffee-flavored tequila and a small bowl of Grape-Nuts. No milk. Just a bit of crunchy fiber to aid his digestive system. He would finish it off with a fig. And then a nap. At ninety-four he was hoping that he would make a hundred and ten and that some American news crew like 20/20 would do a story on him asking to what he attributed his long life, and he could say, “Figs. Figs are the thing.”
After his nap, Gómez would most often get on his bike and make his way through the streets of Tijuana to the house of his young, but really not-so-very-young, friend, Chuy. It is no easy thing to ride a bike in Tijuana; Gómez always felt that the drivers of the cars tried to hit him on purpose, ra
ther than realizing that, between his age and the tequila, he had a tendency to stray into the road. About halfway between the few blocks that separated him from Chuy’s house, Gómez would stop at the OXXO for a six-pack of Del Sol. By this time he was exhausted, what with the exertion and the exhaust from the Most Visited City in the World. He would pop a can, then continue his journey, five more Del Sols in the basket between his handlebars so he could keep an eye on them. Most of the time he would lose some or all of the beers, either from swerving to avoid being hit by a car, or from throwing cans at the cars. His pitching arm was weak, so mostly the cans would just fall at his feet, burst open and spray up at him, usually making him look like he’d peed his old-man pants. Children would ask their mothers why the abuelo was throwing beers on the ground. Mothers would shake their heads and sometimes discreetly put pesos in his basket while they quickly walked by. Because Gómez’s peripheral vision had long since departed this earth, he usually did not see these items being deposited in his basket (sometimes bread, fruit, or even eggs) and he had no choice but to consider them proof of the existence of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
Gómez never knew if Chuy would be home or not. If he was home, Chuy would most likely be in his garage, and this would be quite evident because the garage door would be up. If the garage door was down, Gómez would leave his bike just outside the garage, use the key that Chuy had given him to get into the house, and take a nap on the soft green velvet couch. It was like sleeping on the wings of a parrot. When the mariachi clock in the kitchen went off, Gómez would wake, be it in ten minutes or an hour.
But if the garage was open when Gómez arrived, he would slightly alter his routine by adding in a nod to Chuy before leaving his bike just outside the garage, and going inside to take a nap until the mariachi burst out of the kitchen like a band of knife-wielding banditos. Who the hell could be expected to sleep through the assault of a mariachi band? Then Gómez would join Chuy in the garage and start the conversation as if he had just arrived. Which in a sense, he had.
