by Caryl Rivers
Sean looked at me, horrified. “Peggy, it isn’t funny!”
“Zlotched sounds funny.”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Jeez, Peg, I don’t know what’s with you.”
“I don’t either.”
I don’t remember anything at all about the next day. Lots of people were around; my mother hugged me a lot. I know I went around trying not to act weird but not feeling anything. I guessed I was a terrible person, not feeling anything, and that’s why God took my father.
The following day was the wake. My mother was riding to the funeral home with my aunt and uncle. She looked at me, a worried look, and said I should go with Sean in the Caddy. We drove, in silence, Sean giving me the same worried look as my mother, to the Warner E. Pumphrey Funeral Home in Crystal Springs, a block away from the Hecht Company.
“I wonder how old Clement Kliblicki is doing,” I said and laughed, and I thought I saw Sean wince. I looked at Pumphrey’s, a large brick building, and thought that its lawn and flowers were manicured as carefully as the fingernails of the dead people on view inside. The nuns made us go there in seventh grade when Jimmy Ryan died of blood poisoning and say the Rosary around his coffin. I thought it was barbaric to make people lie out in public after they were dead and didn’t have any say in the matter. If I died, they’d probably lay me out in that icky blue dress my mother thought was so cute but I thought was vomitous. I was really pissed at my mother for a minute, laying me out in that blue dress.
Sean took my hand as we walked to the door. I stopped in front of it.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Peg, you’ve got to!” Sean said, and he literally dragged me through the door. The scent of carnations hit me like a pail of water thrown in my face.
I stopped again.
“The goddamn flowers are going to make me throw up.”
“You’ll get used to them.” He looked at me, exasperated. “Peg, it makes people feel better. I mean, if they didn’t have anything if your father just disappeared—it would be worse. People want to say goodbye.”
“No they don’t. They just want to go in and gawk at a dead person.”
“Peggy, for God’s sake!”
He looked at me, real mad, and the flowers were choking me and I suddenly just felt sick and confused, and like I wanted to cry. I bit down on my lip. I wasn’t going to cry. I hadn’t cried since I was eight years old and got my first Wonder Woman comic book and found my true persona: beautiful, strong, brave, stoic. I invented stories about myself: the Brave Child. The Nazis tortured me, but I didn’t give them the invasion plans. The Godless Atheistic Communists pulled out my fingernails to get me to renounce my faith, but they didn’t get a whimper.
But the dampness was seeping into my eyes, so I bit down harder on the inside of my lip until I felt the warm blood come. Dammit, I wasn’t going to cry, not in front of these people, these strangers. I didn’t cry the day Puddy Kelly tried to pound my face to jelly when I wouldn’t give him my arithmetic homework. I didn’t cry the day Sean and I were duck-walking through the storm sewers and I stepped on a nail and it went right through my Keds and into my foot. I let Sean carry me home piggyback, but I didn’t make a sound. I didn’t even cry when the doctor pulled the nail right out of my foot, and it really hurt, bad. There were tears in Sean’s eyes as he watched the nail come out; he winced as if he could feel it as much as I did.
I looked at Sean now; his green eyes were dark with concern, the anger had flared and gone. He was so different from me. I kept everything inside, tucked away like a hermit crab deep inside a borrowed shell. I could lie with the face of an angel. Sean was as transparent as cellophane. He had tried to lie to me a couple of times, but it never worked, like the time Arlene Hobbs asked him to the junior prom at Georgetown Visitation. Arlene lived up the street, but her parents were snooty, so they didn’t send her to Immaculate Heart, but to Visy where Arlene could hobnob with the daughters of ophthalmologists and periodontists. After the dance, Arlene told me, in that stuck-up pseudo-WASP accent of hers, that Sean had a “passionate nature.”
I got pissed at that and confronted Sean.
“Passionate nature? I bet you didn’t give old Arlene the twenty-minute soul kiss rule,” I said accusingly.
“I did too!” he declared, but his face froze into a mask so stricken and guilty that he looked like a mass murderer caught with blood on his hands, digging a grave under the carport for one of his victims. All he’d done was stick his tongue into old Arlene’s mouth five minutes early, and you’d have thought he was Jack the Ripper. Boys, of course, weren’t supposed to cry, but Sean did. He didn’t know I knew it. In the movies, when John Wayne or Robert Ryan would get it on Iwo, and the violins would swell like crazy, Sean would just keep stuffing popcorn in his mouth, and I could see the tears in his eyes in the glow of the technicolor. Then he’d stage a fake coughing fit so he could blow his nose. He had coughing fits in Flying Leathernecks, Return of Lassie, and East of Eden. I bet he would have had one in Bambi if we went to see it again, when Bambi’s mother got herself whacked out by man.
“Peggy, we can’t just stand here. We have to go in,” he said. He squeezed my hand. I nodded, and we walked into the room together. My mother and my aunt were standing by the coffin; all I could see of it was the bottom part, the dull gleam of the bronze. Father Ryan was there, and he walked over to me and kissed me on the cheek. His breath smelled like Chiclets. That struck me as really weird. Priests shouldn’t smell like Chiclets; it was tacky. I couldn’t picture Christ, preaching to the multitudes, sloshing his Chiclet from one side of his mouth to the other while he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
“Peggy, I’m praying for your father. He’s with God now. Nothing can hurt him, ever again.”
“Thank you, Father,” I said.
“Do you want to say a prayer?”
I saw that there was a kneeler set up right beside the coffin.
“Yes, Father,” I said. I didn’t want to cry anymore. I was just numb again.
My mother walked over to me and said, “Peggy, are you O.K.?” That again. I nodded.
“He was very proud of you, Peggy,” she said.
I walked with Sean to the coffin, and we knelt down. Inside the coffin was something very odd. It looked like my father; like somebody made a big doll of him out of rubber, and put it there, with a Rosary in its hands. It was very still, and smaller than he was, I thought. Not a lot, but a little. So still.
“It’s not him,” I whispered to Sean. He just looked at me.
I looked at the rubber doll that resembled my father. “I know it’s not you,” I said inside my head. “You’re someplace else, but I can’t see you. You’re invisible.” I looked over to the side of the room and I saw him there, smiling that small smile he always wore when something struck him as faintly ridiculous. I saw him, as clear as the chair, the rug, the flowers. I still wonder, years later, whether I was hallucinating, or whether some warp, some tiny blister, formed between the dimensions of life and death and let me peer through. But he was there.
“Say something to me,” I pleaded with him inside my head. “I’m the only one who can hear you.”
But he didn’t, or couldn’t, and he started to fade away, like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. I tried, through sheer force of will, to keep him there, and I suddenly understood that I would never again see that smile, never hear that voice with the soft edges of a southern accent telling me that basketball was—or wasn’t—life.
The pain shot through me like a bolt of electricity. It was so terrible that I nearly doubled up with it. I must have made some sort of involuntary sound because Sean grabbed my arm and held it, and I just knelt there, wondering if the pain was going to kill me or if it was going to recede. It did, and I said to Sean, “I’m O.K.,” and I reached out to touch my father’s forehead. I recoiled—it was cold and hard, like
marble.
I got up, then, and stood with my mother and my aunt in a receiving line as the people came in. Sean stood beside me. Nobody thought that was odd. Sean had been in and out of my house all of his life. The old ladies came through first, smelling of lavender and patting my hand. The girls from school who came by had tears in their eyes; the boys shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other and said, “Real sorry, Peg.” The nuns came, even Sister Justinian. I saw her approaching, and couldn’t imagine what she was going to say. The only emotions I had ever seen Sister Justinian display were contempt, steely calm, and an occasional burst of outright loathing. She smiled, occasionally, when girls broke down and wept because she said they were unfit to wear the uniform, a disgrace to their parents, and despised in the eyes of God. And that was for combing their hair too close to the sink.
She advanced on me, not so much taking my hand as commanding its presence.
“The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away,” she said.
“Yes, Sister.”
“You’re excused from homework.” And she marched off.
And then there weren’t any more people, and Father Ryan left, and my mother said to me, “Peg, a few people are coming back to the house. Do you want to go with us or with Sean?”
“With Sean,” I said. He and I were the last ones out of the room, and as I walked into the hallway, I paused to look back for a minute, and I wished I hadn’t. Two men were closing the casket, and they were putting some thing, some sort of a stiff cover, over my father’s face, and then they started to close the cover.
He can’t breathe! I thought and I said, “No, no!” and Sean grabbed my hand and literally pulled me through the door. He hustled me out the front door and out to the parking lot. We just sat in silence for a minute no other cars were left in the lot, and I said, “We have to get back,” and he said, “In a minute.”
I was deep in my own thoughts, the image of the lid closing over my father’s face running like a continuous film behind my eyes; again and again, the lid came down. I thought it had made a thunderous clang. In my mind, it did. I knew, without a trace of doubt, that my childhood had ended this night, and with it had gone the illusion of safety I had carried with me through the years. Like Humpty-Dumpty, my safe little universe had tottered, fallen, scrambled into an insoluble mess on the sidewalk. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put it together again. But was my father Humpty-Dumpty, or was I?
The fear was a cold, hard knot inside of me. I was alone. Everybody was alone. People died. Life ended. I began to tremble.
Sean put his arm around me. I kept sitting, rigid, trying to will the fear away. I could make it go away if I tried.
“You never cry, Peggy,” Sean said.
“I never do.”
The fear and the pain were knotted inside me, coiled together, with edges like barbed wire. I was afraid to breathe because even the air would hurt me inside, rub me raw. I never knew something could hurt so much.
Then I heard Sean say, “I loved him too, Peggy.”
I looked at him and saw that the tears were spilling out of his eyes, running down his cheeks, and he wasn’t even coughing to try to hide them. I reached up to touch his cheek to wipe the tears away, and the feel of the warm dampness of his skin opened something inside of me. I made a sound in my throat, a wailing, keening sound, and Sean pulled me against him and just held me tight. I started to cry, desperately, with my whole body, like a child cries. I just kept sobbing and couldn’t stop, and Sean held me and stroked my back and just said, over and over, “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
I was getting Sean’s shirt all wet with my tears, but the cold knot inside me was dissolving, and Sean was holding me the way my father used to when I was a child and something frightened me, and I just wanted to burrow into his arms and not ever have to come up. Lots of times I felt older and wiser than Sean, but now I felt small and afraid, and his arms seemed to have grown larger. We used to be the same size, but his chest and shoulders had filled out and broadened, and his body was more a man’s than a boy’s now.
I cried and cried until there wasn’t a drop of water inside me; I couldn’t have peed just then, or spit. I felt limp and exhausted, but the fear was gone. It would come back, I knew. I’d learn to live with it. That was what growing up was all about. Sean kept holding me, and I thought about how I’d acted and what I’d felt, and I wasn’t very proud of myself.
“It’s me I’m crying for,” I said. “I’m so selfish. It’s me I’m thinking about.”
I know,” he said. “But it’s not selfish.”
“He thought I was really special. He made me believe I could do anything.”
“Some fathers do that,” he said, and his voice held a twist of bitterness. But I was too absorbed with my own pain to notice his.
“I’m not really special. I’m just ordinary.”
“No you aren’t, Peggy.”
“He made me do things when I was afraid to do them. He made me go after the ball, take it off the backboard. When he was there, I knew I could do it. Now there won’t be anybody who thinks I’m special.”
“I do,” he said.
I sat up and looked at him.
“I mean—really special. I mean, I want to do the things I dream about. I want to be a journalist. But I won’t be. I’ll just dream about it. It’s different for boys. Boys have to do something. Girls don’t.”
“Peg, you always do what you say you’re going to do. Why should you stop?”
“I do?”
“Yeah. Remember when you said it would be neat to hike through the storm sewers and I said we’d drown and there were snakes in there?”
“Yeah.”
“We did it, right?”
“And I stepped on the nail.”
“And I had to carry you home. And what about the time you said we were going to build a tree house and I said we were just little kids and we couldn’t do it. We built one, right?”
I giggled. “And you were inside it when it fell out of the tree.”
“Thank God we were short and it was only three feet off the ground.”
I’d been coming back to the tree house—Sean was on guard—with two Twinkies when I saw the tree house start to tip and plunge out of the tree.
Sean gave an ear-shattering howl. He thought he was dead, but he only got the wind knocked out of him and sprained his wrist. He was pretty pissed at me, even when I let him eat both the Twinkies.
“Peggy, I figure, unless they tie you down, nobody is going to stop you from doing what you want.”
I looked up at him; his cellophane face was clear, his eyes reflecting no guile. He wasn’t lying. He saw the brave, self-reliant girl I wanted to be, not the nice, docile little Catholic lady that I suspected lived at the heart of me. I looked at myself through his eyes. Of course I would do it. Why shouldn’t I?
“You’re my best friend, Sean,” I said.
“And you’re mine.”
“We’ll always tell each other how great we are. You are, you know. Great.”
He shook his head. “No I’m not. I don’t do anything great. The only thing I do really good is be mediocre. I’m really good at that.” He sighed. “They’ll probably put it under my picture in the yearbook. ‘Sean McCaffrey, 1956. Most mediocre.’”
He said it in that way he had sometimes, of fending off something that hurt by being funny about it.
“Sean, you’re not mediocre. You’re really smart and you care about things and you’re not a real jerk like so many boys are.”
“I’m terrible at sports.”
“You’re not terrible. You’re just—”
“Mediocre.”
“Oh, who cares that you’re not a dumb jock?”
“Me.’’
“Sean, why do you always tear yourself down? My dad always says”—I paused—“my dad always said that you were the cream of the crop. Those w
ere his exact words.” (I didn’t mention that he always added, “God knows how he turned out to be such a sweet kid with that pompous jackass for a father.”)
“He said that? About me?”
“Um hmm. And Sean, all the kids at school are really jealous when I take you to dances.”
“They are?”
“Yes, they say to me, ‘Peggy, Sean is such a hunk.’”
His lips curved up into a little smile; he looked a trifle smug.
“No, they don’t say that.”
“Yes they do.”
“Oh Peggy,” he said, and then he was kissing me and I was kissing him back and my mouth opened under his and I was pressing my body against his with a fierce sort of urgency that I had never felt before. Later, when I knew a lot more about life, I understood that I wanted his mouth and his body so much that night because they were warm and alive, and they could blot out the cold feel of my father’s skin against my hand. I’d always loved kissing Sean, but for the first time that night I felt real adult passion, a flame, all through me, and I understood how a woman could want a man inside her, right inside her body, which had always seemed just a little bit revolting.
The Natural Wonder was pressing against me now, all hard and insistent, and he was moving his hips against me and I was moving right back and I must have given a moan or something, because all of a sudden we both sat bolt upright and realized what we were doing. Fifty feet away my father was lying dead inside that place and we were necking away. In the parking lot at the Warner E. Pumphrey Funeral Home. It was a triumph of hormones over good taste, to say the least.
“Oh Peggy, I’m sorry,” Sean said, the stricken look on his face.
“Sean, it’s OK.”
“I’m such a pig. Oh, how could I?”
He looked out the window of the car. It was right under the rear window at Pumphrey’s. The work room, I guessed.
“Peg, we were necking, right under the place where they, right where—”
“Start the car, Sean.”
He turned on the engine, awash in guilt. He kept groveling as he drove, as if he personally had killed my father.
