by Isla Morley
Greg’s return to our bed went without comment, just as his departure from it had. After months of retreating to separate rooms, covering our grieving hearts with separate sheets, we once again share the same bed, tucked into our familiar hollows without footnotes. And there are no speeches now, in the pause between my rejection or reception of his advances. Thinking that sleep might be coaxed more quickly, I turn to him, and invite him onto my body. Beyond his measured strains, his face buried in my hair, I watch the east window. It has started to rain. Good. There won’t be many fireworks tonight.
After a quiet shudder, Greg wriggles apart awkwardly and I return to my side. “Sorry,” I hear him whisper, and I smile my okay, even though it is too dark for him to see it. A minute later he snores softly and I think, No need for sorry. I offer a body not meant for loving anymore, a hag’s bony embrace.
THE CLATTER OF PANS wakes me up to the first day of January. Greg is cooking pancakes, and I wonder if we are now expected to return to all our prenatal rituals. When I enter the kitchen the teapot is already full, ready for pouring into the teacups only ever used for company.
“I spoke to Rhiaan—we’re on! And I just booked our tickets—we have enough frequent flyer miles for one free round-trip.” He seems almost happy.
“When are we leaving?”
“January twenty-sixth, returning the thirty-first.”
Exactly one month before Cleo’s birthday.
He puts down a plate of pancakes, pours me a cup of tea, and says, “You need to put on some weight; it almost felt like I was sleeping with some other woman last night.”
“You were,” I say without rancor.
I am hungry this morning, so I eat what he puts in front of me, and I can tell by the way he sits straight up that he feels like we have a chance.
“Perhaps we can go skiing,” he chitchats.
“I don’t know how to ski,” I reply, seized with portents of misgiving.
“I’ll teach you, and we can stick to the bunny slopes.”
“Maybe we can just see how it goes,” I say, and then, because he starts to look concerned, “We can read books by the fireplace and sip hot chocolate, how’s that for starters?”
It is only these minuscule kindnesses that I am now capable of, in between the waves of cataclysmic cruelties. And how often I seem to confuse the two. Perhaps Greg is right, that by going on a trip we might find our way back to each other, as we have done before. That what we need is the company of family and a good dose of fresh mountain air to remind us of our vows, to keep from becoming my parents, and his parents, and the countless lost couples who have worn down the marital path with their resigned treading, striding along in step but lost to each other. “Till death us do part,” we promised. Yes, but hadn’t that time come?
Greg rises from the table and says, “I’ve got a wedding this afternoon; I don’t suppose you want to go with me, do you?”
Sunday, January 1, stretches out before me, a mirage of never-ending horizons.
“I’ll go,” I say, surprising us both.
And now a mother-in-mourning on the first day of a year already old with loss, I must find something to wear to face a bride.
GREG HAS NEVER LIKED conducting matrimonial services, and seemed self-conscious even participating in our own. “I prefer funerals,” he would tell people. “They stay dead.” People loved that gag, chuckling with delight at his rare impudence, not believing he was actually serious, which of course he was. He didn’t like working with brides, the ones on their first go-round, with their exhausting picture of the perfect day; or the brides’ mothers, who doled out instructions and dollars in equal measure till the day was whipped into a frothy illusion every bit as rich as the tiramisu at the end of the buffet line. Or even the brides on the second, sometimes third, go-round, who knew enough to have prenups and exit strategies. Allergic to hairspray and gardenias, plentiful even in those with Motel 6 budgets, Greg is always runny-eyed and red-nosed in the bridal pictures. But brides and allergies aside, what annoyed Greg the most was the ease with which covenants were made and blessed, and then broken.
They stay dead is all I can think while the bride lip-synchs her vows. Greg gestures to remind her to look at her betrothed while she repeats them, not at him, and the audience shudders with a delighted tee-hee. I look around the church. Same crowd that shows up for funerals, only a little more bored perhaps. The living stay dead too, apparently.
I was three months pregnant when I first pictured Cleo’s wedding. Saw her floating in my grandmother’s wedding dress, a dress whose fibers carried the traces of genealogy, one that was layered in promises for each of its would-be wearers. Each of whom, as it turned out, chose something else—my mother a maternity-friendly suit and me something that didn’t involve costly alterations and a psychological overhaul. But Cleo—she was surely destined for the dress, leapfrogging over our failures to claim the promises of a happily-ever-after.
“But it’s going to be a boy!” Jenny argued when I told her about my vision.
“No it’s not.”
“Well, if I’m wrong—and that has happened once before—tell the preacher to start saving, because it’s going to be a big wedding.”
The congregation stands and applauds dutifully. The bride and groom, having tripped through their lines, look happy the ordeal is over. Swooshing past me in a shimmering gown obviously not her grandmother’s, the bride beams directly at the cameras.
I walk against the flow of well-wishers, toward the chancel where Greg is collecting his notes and glasses. Not looking up, he takes the mike off the stand, unplugs it, and winds up the cord. We are both at a loss, strangers again.
An earnest little man shuffles up with his hand already extended. “Reverend?” he calls to Greg. “I just wanted to say that was a very pleasant service . . .,” and then when Greg looks at him and he sees Greg’s red-rimmed eyes, he becomes apologetic and embarrassed.
“Pardon me,” he says, and makes an about-face from what he mistakes for sentiment rather than allergies. But then I notice I am the one who is mistaken, that Greg, perhaps reminded of the one wedding he will never conduct, is welling up.
“Do you have to go to the reception?” I ask. “Can we skip it and just go home?”
“Give me a minute. I’ll find the best man and let him know.”
Greg walks away from me looking like a man huddled beneath an umbrella that has blown out the other way.
When we get home, I ask him to get the trunk down from the attic.
“What do you want from it?” he asks.
“My grandmother’s wedding dress.”
When he comes back with the chest, I open it up and dig to the bottom till my fingers find the package. The tissue paper around it has yellowed and in its folds are cockroach egg cases, but the dress remains intact. It smells of old things, dead things, of books that haven’t been open for a hundred years. It is the dress of Miss Havisham, the dress for a corpse, and as it unfolds, ghosts seem to fly about the room.
“Greg,” I cry, “let’s burn it.”
For a moment he is confused and then he nods, and suddenly I want to burn other things too, to make an offering to Cleo, so that the embers might fly up to meet her. In her room, from her bed, I retrieve Tow-Tow the Turtle, still soiled from being dragged all over the place. I reach for the dress Jenny hand-stitched for her baptism, but Greg says, “Please, Abbe, not that.” So I take her favorite pair of pajamas and her pink blankie instead. A big fire, is all I can think. A raging inferno big enough that the neighbors will complain and the fire engines will come, a fire big enough not to be doused by a torrent of tears.
Greg suggests we put everything in the old wheelbarrow and I tell him we should wait until nighttime. Midnight, perhaps. A new New Year.
He finds me when I am rummaging through his bureau drawer and shows me the wooden train he made from a kit for her. Yes, I nod frantically. “Good.”
“My dollhouse,” I tell him,
“let’s burn that too,” and he is off to get it.
I find my bag of hair, still in its ponytail; the stink alone will offend the gods. I add it to the pile and keep rummaging. Behind my jewelry box are my mother’s rabbit-skin gloves—the only thing I have of hers besides her worn gold band and her dentures, which replaced the real teeth my father knocked out. One glove is gnawed at the opening where Solly chewed on it before I salvaged it, but its rescue means nothing now. It will burn and be no more.
With the load piled into a neat flammable tower in the living room, I look for Greg. He is in the study, the journal open on his lap. He started writing Cleo an open-ended love letter the day after she was born. Snapping the book closed, he hands it to me for the pile. “What about photos?”
“No. No photos,” I say. But I remember the needlepoint of Peter Rabbit my grandmother did for me, still hanging by Cleo’s bookshelf. Heirlooms burn the best. And then I go to our bedroom, take my pillow collected with night terrors and tears, and pluck from it a handful of feathers.
We sit a long time and look at the heap. Greg brings me a beer, and it seems that this is the first time we have truly done something together since Cleo died.
For all my fury at the world for spinning on its axis, despite all my rage at the old people who have the nerve to keep on living and breathing and abluting next door to the home of a dead child, I call Mrs. Chung and Gillian Beech with an apology. I tell them both the same thing: Do not be alarmed, no need to call the fire department, my husband and I will be having a bonfire in our backyard tonight. Sorry for the disturbance. Yes of course, they say. Not a problem. Will let the other neighbors know.
So at 9:25 p.m., when we are too impatient to wait for midnight, Greg stacks up everything on the rusty green wheelbarrow and pushes it beyond the banana trees. After a squirt of lighter fluid, he throws in a lit match.
I am unprepared for the blaze, for the heat that makes us both back up. There is just a trickle of fear along with the question of turning on the hose. The dress—four yards and a hundred years of romantic illusion—is the first to burn, and then it is too late to stop it. I know this about fires: they have a life of their own and they pretty much don’t give a damn who got them started. Or who gets burned.
IT DIDN’T MATTER that my mother started the fire that almost burned down our house. Only why. It might have been an “honest-to-God mistake,” just like she said later, but I wondered if she didn’t mean to, in a volcanic moment of defiance, burn up the house and its rotten contents with it.
I would not have been at home when the fire started if Mrs. Beasley from two doors down had not seen me walking to the store for my mother’s jar of tartar sauce and offered to give me a ride on her way there and back. What my mother knew would be a forty-five minute errand, if I took an extra ten minutes to sneak a read of the latest comic book, turned out to be a little less than quarter of an hour. Long enough for the crackling and spitting oil on the stove to tire of its unattended pot. I heard, when I walked back into the house, the soft poohf it made when it leapt out of the pot and we watched the shiny flames climb the checked curtains like a cat after a lizard.
“Jesus Christ, Louise!” my father yelled, running into the kitchen. As he barked orders at me to bring wet towels and cursed till I felt sure hell had come to swallow us up, my mother stood rooted in one spot like a witch tied to her stake. That’s when it first occurred to me that this was no accidental kitchen fire, but arson. I watched the orange and black shadows writhe and twitch on the hallway wall like some kind of monster. By the time he had put out the fire, the monster had turned the house into a black cloud, my mother into a lump of coal, and my father into a white-hot poker.
It took a week to wipe away the oily black grime, but nothing was the same after that fire. If anything, it seemed only to blaze on in my father’s chest. It was he who needed my grandmother’s lake, its waters to lap at the edges of his infernal anger. If I thought before, having overheard my mother’s ghastly prayer, that she had a death wish, after the fire I became even more convinced. The only question unanswered in my mind was by whose hand the wish would be granted.
THE HAIR AND FEATHERS have made the air pungent, and I wonder what burning flesh smells like. It was wrong to burn Cleo. Just plain wrong. We should have buried her. But somehow it did not seem right to put her in a hole in the ground either. Greg preferred a burial plot, a place that marked the spot, a place he could visit as he would a decrepit relative in an old-age home. He had buried our old dog, Jingles, in the backyard of the parsonage next to the bird of paradise and claimed it had been therapeutic. Maybe it was. I would see him when I was washing dishes, sitting out there in the corner of the yard on the lava rock, muttering away like a vagabond. When he came in for supper, his face damp and doughy, I would think it was nothing but dragging things out. I never went to the spot where Jingles’s rotting corpse lay in Greg’s old backpack. I couldn’t bear the thought of our old companion packed down there like a clod of soil. And then we moved and renters occupied the parsonage, and Jingles was forgotten. So what good was that?
Cremation, then, had been my decision, my only decision, and it has turned out to be something far, far worse than what Greg wanted. Ashes. Ashes had sounded almost reverential at first. Fitting, like Ash Wednesday: so solemn and holy. The minister—holding the bowl, finger cocked as though on a trigger—awaits your remorseful approach down the center aisle to the altar. And then, eyes lowered, you feel his finger take aim, lining up with the crosshairs of your forehead. Scratch. And then another scratch. Back in the pew, you watch the other people walk by, examine their smudgy crosses, wonder if yours looks blurred too. That the ashes are smeared—and the next morning wiped entirely away on the pillow—is a little disappointing. For one bold, blind moment, you want the world to know what a phony your life turned out to be, that upon the illusion is at least one distinct blemish. X, okay, marks the spot. A welcome respite from the Jolly-Rogering of Christmas and Epiphany, Lent somehow makes room for the deep black brand that has been there all along. Sacrificing, Lent leads you to believe, will erase it.
Living without Cleo is a lifetime of Lents back to back. So ashes seemed fitting. Then. But I was unprepared for them being her ashes. What came home, in the little heart-shaped koa box, was not the holy dust of burnt palm fronds and wood chips, but gravel. Bits of Cleo’s ground-up bones, coarse as pebbles, seared white. Not ashes that inspired acts of attrition, but ones that reminded me of all I had given up. Little more than a saltshakerful. People don’t tell you these things when you are about to burn your child.
It is all too much: to think of Cleo’s hair burning, to remember my father’s combustible tendencies in the weeks that followed our house fire. And now he is dead, buried alongside my mother in their unvisited graves. And Cleo has no grave.
Greg comes to me from the other side of the fire when he sees me pull on my hair and bend over, the scream just a silent rage. He cannot help me stand upright, so we crumple on the hard cement in an awkward embrace. “They stay dead,” I cry out. “They stay dead!”
In the distance, we hear the fire truck’s siren.
THIRTEEN
Ten minutes till touchdown and still I can’t think of 14 across: Pope’s lovers (6, 7). I guess that rules out NUNS. Whoever picked up the airline’s magazine before me has scribbled in LARK in 5 down, giving me L as the second letter, but still I am drawing a blank. It is the word that runs away with me: lovers. “Lovers” means passion, passion transgression, transgression a price. Not a good note with which to start a vacation, so instead I close the magazine, tuck it in my backpack, and imagine Cicely’s face awaiting our arrival. Cicely, a woman who comes without a price tag.
No matter how hard I tried, even on my best days, I was never able to match Cicely’s enthusiasm for life. Leaping from Yuletide to Easter to Thanksgiving as though each Hallmark holiday were a stepping-stone (with tasteful decorations to match), my brother’s wife has avoided gloom
with enviable good nature. Which is not to say that Cicely’s life of privilege, bequeathed to her by her parents and then doubly assured by her husband, has numbed her to the plight of others less fortunate. Cicely, who visited South Africa but once after she married Rhiaan, had reportedly cried for days after seeing the puddles of street kids outside the stores, high from glue, burn-scarred hands cupped for coins. She became so passionate about these orphans that she started a campaign half a world away that had sent thousands of dollars in aid.
It was easy to see why Rhiaan was in love with her, then and still, after seventeen years of marriage. Rhiaan, a celebrated South African poet in exile, had drawn large audiences in the seventies, mostly female. Groupies, Cicely called them, as if Rhiaan were the lead singer in a rock band, as if she had not been one of the good-looking girls vying for his attention. It had been her good looks that won him over. Her good looks, and her good, bright heart. First he, and then the rest of us, got caught up in the gravitational pull that was Cicely’s overflowing enthusiasm. An unlikely match, some said—this poet of dark thoughts of a dark land and the luminous child of Marin County’s wealthiest couple. Looking at them confirmed it: Rhiaan, shorter than his wife by several inches, freckled and bespectacled, burnt-orange hair; Cicely, with the improbable assemblage of parts that made her both lean and endowed, topped with a cascade of now dove-gray hair that fell well beyond her shoulders.
Rhiaan had loved Cicely from the get-go with a lack of caution we had never seen as children growing up. If anyone in our home had once loved, it must have been guarded, private, as though suitable for a lavatory. Punishable even. And Cicely, who read the old poems and still cried, returned the favor by birthing twins who are each a perfect braid of their mother’s wholeheartedness and their father’s sagacity. Claude and Francine, required as teenagers to treat Cicely’s devotion to them as a public humiliation to be endured, privately adore their mother.
