I talked to a woman once arrested for indecency who volunteered for her church these days. She’d danced with live cockatiels on both arms until one of the birds attacked someone at a show and she had to give them up. I talked to two dancers who never threw in the towel. They still performed on the revival circuit, jumping out of clam shells at the age of eighty-nine.
In the end, I got five out of the ten to confirm. Three others were maybes. Two were too sick to make it. Still, it was a start. I decided to take a ride out to Sunrise Commons to share the good news with Mamie.
It was a perfect spring day, and on the way, I rolled down all the windows and took deep breaths of fresh air until my mind felt temporarily defogged. It wasn’t until I got to the parking lot of the home that I remembered Daniel’s message. Now that it was in front of me, I wanted to write back. It would be so easy to dash off a text. Instead, I pressed a button and my screen went dark. Then I grabbed the dress and went inside.
When I got to the reception desk, I was told Mamie was not available because she was “recovering.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked the woman with the giant teeth. “Recovering from what?”
“Mamie left the grounds yesterday,” she said. “She wandered to a diner five miles from here. On the way back, she had a fall.”
“What kind of fall?”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Are you family?”
“She hates her family,” I said.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she said.
I just stood there for a few minutes in the lobby after that, watching the receptionist tap away at her touch screen, as if everything were completely normal. Eventually, though, I told her I needed to use the restroom. Then, I headed down the hallway toward the restroom where I took a jagged left turn toward the passageway to Memory Care.
Mamie’s door was closed, but it wasn’t locked, and when I stepped inside, I was surprised to find no one on duty. Instead, I found the shades pulled and the lights off. I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark before I could find the bedside light, and when I flipped it on, I got my first look at Mamie in the shadows.
She was on an IV and there was a large bandage across her forehead. Her hair and makeup weren’t done, and I could finally see the age in her face: the thick lines from her mouth to the bottom of her chin, the loose cheeks and heavy-lidded eyes. I set the dress down on a chair and moved closer. Mamie’s pupils opened to the room.
“It’s you,” she said in a hoarse voice.
I sat down on the bed and put my hand over Mamie’s, which was cool and soft.
“Oh, Tilly,” said Mamie, “I’m afraid I’ve made a mess of things.”
I squeezed her hand.
“You don’t need to apologize for anything,” I said.
I picked up Mamie’s hand and saw that her fingernails were speckled with patches of old nail polish. Either she had gone without a manicure, or she’d scratched them in the fall.
“I’m not supposed to have visitors,” she said. “They even turned my husband away.”
Her husband, I remembered, was no longer alive.
“It’s okay,” I said. “They told me I could stay.”
I got up and prowled around Mamie’s dresser, looking over her beauty supplies. She had never completely left the glitz of her dancing days behind, even in assisted living. And sure enough, at the base of the mirror, there was a row of candy-colored nail polish.
I picked the one that looked the brightest and made my way back over to the bed. I lifted her hand and held it gently. Then I uncapped the nail polish and began to apply a rich red coat to her right thumb.
“Here is what’s going to happen,” I said. “You are going to be strong for three more days. That’s the soonest I think I can get things together. But I’m going to do it. It’s going to happen.”
I moved from Mamie’s thumb to her pointer finger, painting as delicately as I could, but my hand wouldn’t stop shaking. Mamie looked up at me. I kept talking.
“There’s going to be a big party, full of all your friends, and it’s going to be scandalous and amazing and nothing bad is going to happen because sometimes everything is perfect.”
I painted the rest of the row and blew on Mamie’s fingers. Mamie rested her unpainted hand on my back. And when I looked at her, it was hard to tell how present she was. There was something glassy about her gaze.
“Will you put it on?” she asked.
I looked around.
“My dress,” she added. “The one you brought. I want you to try it on.”
I glanced over at the dress, draped on the arm of a chair. I’d never even seen Mamie look at it.
“I brought it for you,” I said.
“I know,” said Mamie. “I want to remember what I looked like.”
It took me a moment to understand what she meant, but it came to me soon enough. I walked over to the chair where I’d set the gown. Then I went into Mamie’s small bathroom and took off the jeans and tank top I’d been wearing. In the cramped room, I raised my arms and pulled the filmy dress down over my body.
It was a little big in the chest, but otherwise it fit well. It made me look like I had an hourglass figure for the first time in my life. I glanced at myself in the mirror, made sure the zipper was tight, and came back into the room. Mamie looked at me when I appeared. She smiled.
“I remember attaching each of those stones,” she said. “I did each one by hand.”
I felt my eyes widen.
“You made this?”
“My mom taught all of us to sew. I thought I’d save a buck. I made all my own gowns. This one was my favorite, though. I wore it the last time I performed.”
I moved closer to her and watched Mamie reach a hand out and touch the material. She closed her eyes as she rubbed it between the thumb and forefinger of the hand without the polish, maybe envisioning her last dance, maybe just relishing the sensation of the glossy fabric.
“Thank you, dear,” she said.
“For what?” I asked.
“For the funeral party.”
Her voice was so soft now I could barely hear her.
“We haven’t had it yet,” I said. “It’s in three days. Remem-ber?”
Mamie’s eyes closed again, and she smiled.
“No,” she said. “I was there. It was wonderful.”
I stood there and watched her slowly drift to sleep. Moments later, a nurse barged in and shooed me out. She said they were moving Mamie back to the hospital. Something new had shown up on the CT scan. I asked to come along, but I wasn’t allowed. So, I could only watch from a distance as they loaded up Mamie on a gurney and wheeled her away.
I remembered I was still wearing the dress on my way back to the parking lot, which explained the odd looks I got from the staff. My other clothes were left behind in Mamie’s room, but it was too late to go back and get them now. So I drove home in a decades-old burlesque costume, this time getting goose bumps from the breeze through the car, as the blue sky and fields blurred around me.
In the house, I found my father sitting at the kitchen table eating a sandwich. He gave me a double take in the dress, but made no immediate comment. There was a guilty look on his face, and his clothes looked a little disheveled. I poured myself some burnt coffee from the pot that had likely been on all morning. I could feel him watching me.
“What’s going on?” he said.
I wasn’t able to speak for a moment. There weren’t clear words for what I was feeling. The closest I could come was:
“There’s no such thing.”
My dad’s mouth was still half open. There was a small piece of lettuce between his lower front teeth. He put his hand on my shoulder and then took it off again.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Closure,” I said.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, but it didn’t help. The tears were coming now, like it or not, and I was quickly becoming a slobbering fool.
“We can’t do a living funeral for Mamie,” I said. “And I just wanted it so badly. She deserved it. But it’s not going to happen.”
My face was smashed against my father’s sweater now, against the rough fibers that scratched against my forehead. His arms were around me. They were long and clumsy, but I was happy to have them there.
He didn’t ask me any more questions. He just sat absolutely still and let me cry for the next few minutes. It was something he had always been good at, knowing when not to say something. When I removed my face from his shoulder there was a damp spot there. I looked up at him and calmed my voice.
“There’s not really any closure,” I said. “Is there?”
“I don’t know, Tess,” he said.
“So, then what’s the point of what we do?” I asked. “If we can’t provide that.”
“Well . . .” he said. He handed me a napkin for my tears. “Maybe part of it’s just to reaffirm to people.”
“Reaffirm what?”
He looked away and scratched his chin, covered in black and gray stubble. Then he met my eyes again, and for once he didn’t look like a sad clown. He looked serious.
“That we don’t need as much closure as we think we do.”
25
Mamie Lee died a day and a half later. When she fell, she had fractured her skull above the ear and torn an artery. Her brain was beginning to swell even when she spoke to me that last afternoon. By the time they brought her in for surgery the swelling was irreversible. She died in a coma, and later that day my dad was notified that she had left money behind for her funeral and she wanted his business to plan it.
“Tess,” he said when he showed up to my room, “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you’re sorry.”
“For what exactly?”
“For not taking Mamie seriously,” I said. “And please just tell me you want to do this right.”
He leaned against the doorframe.
“Okay. How is it going to work?”
I told him about Harry Palmer’s.
“Jesus,” he said. “You went to that place by yourself?”
“Harry is a shrewd businessman,” I said.
“I wish you would have told me,” he said.
“I bet you do.”
Eventually Dad apologized and acquiesced to my demands. We would fly Mamie’s old friends in and fix up Palmer’s to look like a New York burlesque club. If it took all the money she set aside, then so be it.
So, in the days before the funeral we painted the walls red and put up silk curtains in the strip club. Then my dad hired a handyman, and they built a makeshift runway with a few theater seats around it. The only illumination came from footlights to accentuate the legs of the performers. “They’re the last to go!” proclaimed Candy, an aging dancer with hair dyed the color of a blood orange. She showed up from the airport at five in the morning.
Because of the short notice, the crowd was smaller than I hoped. Besides the old burlesquers there was only me, my dad, Harry Palmer, and a few of the younger strippers from his club. And, of course, the body of Mamie herself, displayed in the corner, bathed in a magenta spotlight.
She was in the rhinestone dress, and we hired one of the best makeup artists in town to make her look like she was about to go onstage. She had dark-lined cat eyes, long spidery lashes, and glittering bright red lipstick. Her white Betty Page haircut was side-swept along her face in waves.
Onstage was Lillian Orlando. She was telling a story about the time she and Mamie caused a car crash, crossing the street to get Chinese food in their stage costumes. Then her song came on, and she did a memorial fan dance to a big band tune. For ten minutes she eclipsed two black feathered fans across her body, strutting above the floodlights, ending the number entirely hidden behind the plumes of her veil.
It was all really beautiful, I guess.
I mean there’s something undeniably soul-lifting about elderly exotic dancers shaking it for their fallen comrade. But I couldn’t quite slough off my sadness. The fact remained: Mamie never got to see this. She died without a reunion, without a chance to be who she most wanted to be again.
After a while, I decided to escape to the bathroom for a minute to catch my breath. When I approached the restroom door, however, it swung open and out walked a woman in stylish mourning gear. Even without getting a good look, I knew instantly who it was.
“Grace,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
Grace fiddled with her hair and looked around the room.
“Attending the burlesque funeral of Mamie Ann Lee,” she said. “I heard you did most of the planning on this one. Congratulations. It looks great.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Oddly enough, I was glad she was there. If I was being honest with myself, some of her advice from that day at her office had guided me. I was about to say something when she looked around again with an anxious gaze.
“Did you know Mamie?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” she said.
Her eyes were still scanning the room. I waited until her eyes came back to me.
“Then how did you find out about this?”
“Your father,” she said.
She spoke quickly, and I almost didn’t hear her.
“What about him?”
The skin around her freckles was turning pink.
“He invited me. We’ve been . . . corresponding a little.”
My father came across the room just then.
“Grace,” he said. “You made it!”
Then he turned to me.
“Tessie,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind. I thought Grace should get a look at the competition, now that we’re ramping up our efforts.”
He smiled his charming, goofy smile, and rested his hand on her forearm, ever so briefly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just need a moment.”
The humid club was closing in on me. It seemed very clear, suddenly, that Grace had only taken an interest in me to get close to my supposedly dreamy, single father. So I walked away from the restrooms and stepped outside into the cool of the evening in order to be less aware of this fact for a moment.
Still it stung. Was I going to go the rest of my life thinking anyone who showed any interest in me was my best friend? Was I going to be the last person to understand what was actually happening to me every time? An entire life like that seemed like the most exhausting thing imaginable.
Harry Palmer’s was by the railroad tracks, and there was a large freighter inching by about twenty feet away. Each car’s graffiti was more vibrant than the last’s. It was an unending colorful sentence full of odd words I didn’t understand. J-FISH. BOWLER. NADA-NADA. FUGUE. I wondered for a moment if it was a message just for me. My phone buzzed.
Don’t go back inside.
I stared down at the sentence from Daniel. My heart started beating in my ears.
Inside where?
The train clacked by, but it sounded like it was running inside my head.
I think you know.
I looked up from my phone, and in the space between the cars, I saw the outline of a figure. I waited until the last car had rumbled past, and then the person was walking toward me. It was a person that, up until now, I had only seen naked. Today, he was in a T-shirt and jeans, a backpack hanging off his right shoulder on a single strap, and a worn baseball cap on his head.
He took his time moving across the tracks. Then he stopped a few feet in front of me. His face was expressionless. He was more striking in person; his brows framing deep brown eyes with flecks of yellow. A few black locks of hair had escaped his hat and brush
ed against his forehead. I watched him lick his dry lips.
“No more phones,” he said.
He was a real person, standing in the same physical space that I was in.
“No more phones,” I said.
I reached out a hand.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Actual Tess.”
He took my hand and gave it one brief shake. His palm was warm.
“Actual Daniel,” he said.
“Nice to meet you.”
I was staring, but I couldn’t help it. I tried to look away, but it was impossible. I couldn’t believe he was actually here.
“What, you weren’t expecting a brown guy?” he said. “I sent you a picture.”
I looked away.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” I said.
We were by the open door of the club, and there was a change in the music. All day there had been a steady blast of horns and rolling pianos. Raucous old music that brought raucous old women to the stage. Then suddenly, there came the soothing sound of Bobby Darin’s voice. A song I remembered from the Oldies station my grandma used to listen to. Beyond the Sea. All of the dancers started to gather on the stage.
“How did you find me?” I asked Daniel.
I still wasn’t sure that he was standing next to me. But I could smell the soap on his skin.
“Magic,” he said.
I looked at him.
“I called your dad. His number’s online.”
I turned back to the stage and listened to the song.
Somewhere beyond the sea. She’s there watching for me.
The old dancers had been drinking most of the day, and now they were in various states of undress. Lilli was still in a corset from an earlier number. Candy was in a shimmery purple evening gown with a giant boa wrapped around her neck. Another woman, Maggie L’amour, was topless, her drooping breasts covered only by pasties the size of silver dollars.
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