She Poured Out Her Heart

by Jean Thompson

  Charlie sat. Haley said, “Dad, I really need for you to watch your language while the kids are here.”

  Stan made a show of looking around the room and beneath the table. “Kids? I don’t see any kids.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Charlie said. “I believe that what we have going on here is an assholery contest. Who has the biggest, hairiest—”

  “You both win,” Bonnie said. “You both get a prize. Now please. Mom would be really unhappy to hear this.”

  That shut them up at least until Stan finally ate some food and went off to bed, and Charlie took a six-pack with him to go watch television. Bonnie and Haley put the food away and cleaned the kitchen. Haley said, “Mom wanted to be cremated. Did you know?”

  “I think I do too. As soon as possible.”

  “They’re both lost without her and they don’t know what to do except have tantrums.”

  “I don’t want to keep refereeing them, it’s exhausting.”

  “They just have to get through the service. Then they never have to see each other again.”

  They worked in silence for a time, then Bonnie said, “About the cremation. It’s not like I enjoy thinking about these things, but when do they . . .”

  “After the service. We’ll get to see her, then they take her away. We’ll get the, I think they call them cremains, later. I know. I don’t like thinking about it either. We have to pick out clothes for her, Stan’s no help. Something pretty. You know she’d want to look pretty.”

  Charlie had fallen asleep wrapped in a blanket in the den, and Bonnie took the basement for herself. She slept and woke up an hour later, suddenly, her heart knocking, as if something had alerted her. The dishwasher rumbled in the kitchen overhead, but otherwise the house was quiet. Nerves, or bad dreams, maybe, although she could not remember dreaming.

  She got up, went to the bathroom, drank water from the tap. She thought about calling Eric. It wasn’t all that late, not yet midnight. She had lost her mother, she was allowed, she had even been given permission to do what she would with him. How had she gotten herself to such a desperate place, wanting to use poor Claudia as some horrible excuse to cozy up to her illicit lover? But Eric was another loss, an emptiness, a bereavement, and there seemed no cure for this. Why should she always be alone? Always cast aside? Oh goddamn you Stan, who said she couldn’t find a man? She’d found any number of them. She just couldn’t keep them around. Then she was ashamed of herself and her unending blackhearted desires.

  Her phone pinged. It was a text from Eric: So sorry. Bonnie texted back: Thanks. She was weak with gratitude. She fell asleep with the phone cradled next to her and slept until morning.

  There was another day to get through before the service, and they managed by keeping out of each other’s way, by keeping busy with preparations. There had been a brief death notice, and now there was an obituary to write. Stan insisted on having a hand in this, and since he could hardly be told no, Claudia was memorialized as “a beautiful and classy lady who knew a thing or two about a thing or two.” The house kept filling up with flowers. Stan and Claudia’s connections in the world of high-end art went in for dramatic arrangements of orchids, curly willow, anthurium, and bear grass. Charlie said they looked a lot like Stan’s sculptures. “You know, ugly on principle.” But at least he did not say this in Stan’s presence.

  On the day of the service, Bonnie and Haley got to the chapel early to see to things. They met the yoga instructor/spiritual advisor, a tall blonde dressed in clothes that resembled origami constructions. It was unexpected to see so much high style in the middle of rural Wisconsin, but then, Bonnie reminded herself, there was a bit of an artist’s colony that had grown up in town. Jewelry makers, potters, even a theater group that staged experimental plays. The yoga woman said that she had in mind some remarks that would be spiritual, though not really religious. They nodded. They had not wanted the Lutheran pastor and his Bible verses. “And then, if family members or others want to speak in remembrance of her . . .” The yoga woman lifted a blond eyebrow, waiting for them to volunteer.

  “We didn’t prepare anything,” Bonnie said, panic fluttering in her. She didn’t think it had occurred to any of them.

  The yoga woman said it was better to speak from the heart anyway. Sure, unless your heart, like Bonnie’s, resembled the lint trap in a dryer.

  The man from the funeral home led them to the side room where Claudia’s coffin lay. It would not be displayed in the chapel. They had all, miraculously, agreed on this. Bonnie hung back. She felt fizzy, lightheaded. She didn’t want to look, she was squeamish about the dead. They brought her no comfort. The man from the funeral home stepped aside, discreet, professionally sympathetic. Bonnie allowed herself a quick, blurred glance. Claudia wore the pale blue wool dress they’d chosen for her. The funeral home had used too much hair spray on her and made her eyebrows too dark. There was something wrong with her jaw. Bonnie seemed to remember that they wired it shut so it wouldn’t fall open. Haley murmured something to the funeral home man, yes, very nice, thank you. Claudia did not look pretty. She only looked dead.

  Once they were back in the chapel, it felt as if the worst might be over, but that feeling didn’t last long. They set up the guest book and the pictures of Claudia on tables in the vestibule. Claudia as a pretty blond child in a homemade Easter dress. High school graduation. Holding babies. Riding in a motorboat with Stan. Nothing with Carl Rizzi. Bonnie and Haley had agreed on that. They’d found a few photos but they all seemed to have been taken with the same bad camera. They made both Claudia and Carl look dark and shifty, like somebody else’s immigrant grandparents.

  Out of necessity, Stan and Charlie and the children had driven there together. It was a ten minute ride but they arrived looking as if they had traveled cross-country. People began to file in and the family, that is, Stan and Haley and Bonnie, stood at the entrance to greet them. Old neighbors who had made the trip, some of Stan’s art world friends, Claudia’s friends from different places. Haley started the music, and Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” came out of the chapel’s speakers. It helped to have music, gave everything the feeling of a ceremony. Higher love, higher love, yes, there had to be something out there less confounding, less selfish, less of everything that you had tried and failed at. Steve Winwood was succeeded by Leonard Cohen, and then, as the family and others took their seats in the pews, Judy Collins. The yoga woman mounted to the pulpit, and Haley cut the music and took her seat.

  Leah, who was sitting next to Bonnie in the front row, tugged at her sleeve. “Is she a real witch?” Bonnie shook her head. Leah looked disappointed. “Dear friends,” the yoga woman began, her amplified voice clear and assured from much practice in exhorting people how to breathe. “We are here today to remember and to celebrate a wonderful soul. A wife, mother, friend, and lover of life in all its beauty and variety. An unfailing source of kindness. A seeker of peace and wisdom.”

  So far so good. Standard spiritual boilerplate. It would be harder to sit through anything personal. Bonnie was relieved to see that the chapel was nearly full, and that Stan and Charlie had chosen to sit in different pews and ignore each other. The chapel was a new building, with a great many high windows, white surfaces, and blond wood. Her eyes closed against the glare, lulled by the yoga woman’s well-modulated urgings to view our earthly selves as merely containers for the precious spirit within. Like milk cartons, maybe. Stale dated. Stamped with expiration codes. Or no, she had not said all that. One by one several women with Kleenex wadded in their fists came to the pulpit and offered their tributes.

  Bonnie tried to pull herself out of her fit of dozing, fell back again. She should be thinking about Claudia, she should be actively mourning. She guessed that would come later. She was so weary. Stress catching up to her. The body perished, the spirit took flight. Birdybirdybirdy. The darkness behind her eyelids was so pleasant
and so welcoming. A nudge in her side from Leah. Her head had drooped forward and she had begun to snore, a buzzing sound. Bonnie jerked awake, righted herself, and when she opened her eyes she was dismayed to see her brother mounting the steps that led to the pulpit.

  The yoga woman stepped aside politely. Charlie positioned himself at the lectern, gripping its sides. He did not seem drunk. Neither did he seem sober. Ill, perhaps. The skin beneath his eyes looked bruised. He’d been mistreating his body for so long, and now it was beginning to give out. Charlie cleared his throat. “Death,” he began, and paused for a too-long beat. “Sucks.”

  A few people tittered, as if hoping to find this funny, but most of them stayed silent. “I mean,” Charlie went on, “I know we’re in the business of finding the silver lining here, but why kid ourselves? Death. Let the idea roll around in your head for a minute. It’s the end of the line. Finito. There’s no upside.”

  Bonnie turned her head to scan the length of the pew and saw Haley staring back at her. Haley looked shaky. Bonnie expected she did too. Charlie had stopped speaking. It did not give the impression of a rhetorical strategy, only mental vacancy. Then he came to himself again. “She wasn’t even that old. She took good care of herself. It’s not like this is what, Africa or someplace. Where people die all the time. Kids. Ebola, even. I mean, whoa.”

  Please stop, Bonnie told him silently. She tried to make eye contact with Charlie but he was not looking at her, or, it seemed, at anything in the room. Maybe he was drunk. The people in the pews were stony quiet, waiting for it to be over. It kept not being over.

  “We have doctors here. Why didn’t some doctor see this coming? Well it’s too late for that. Nobody was paying attention. I wasn’t paying attention. I guess I thought she was always going to be around. Always be my mom. Always doing things for everybody else. Keeping the, what I call the art-industrial complex going.”

  Stan’s voice rumbled from across the room. He said something that included the word “crap.”

  “Because she sure bought into all that. Look where it got her. Behind every great man is a dead woman.”

  At some point in Charlie’s monologue, Bonnie had made frantic signals to Haley, mouthing words until Haley got it, rose from her seat, and went to the sound system on the back wall, so that Charlie’s last words had to compete with Judy Collins launching into “Amazing Grace.”

  Bonnie got to her feet and signed for Leah and Benjamin to do so as well. “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,” Bonnie began, and the children looked at each other, then joined in with their wavering trebles. Haley came back to the pew and stood alongside them. She had a good clear voice and it carried. “That saved a wretch like me.” Across the aisle, the front pew stood, raggedly, and tried to catch up. “I once was lost, but now I’m found.”

  Charlie said, “What is this, like the Academy Award speeches? You only have three minutes?”

  “Was blind, but now I see,” Bonnie sang, and stepped out of the pew. “Go,” she said to the children. “Keep singing.”

  Obediently they set off down the aisle to the back of the church, singing, two identical blond angels. Haley came to the end of the pew and she and Bonnie followed them, an impromptu recessional. Charlie gave up, came down from the pulpit and sat on the step beneath it, rubbing at his eyes.

  “’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear.” Everyone stood and sang along or tried to. Nobody knew all the lyrics. They came in a beat or so behind the singer, but they chimed in on “grace,” and by the second verse the recorded choir was backing Judy up, by the third the sound was strong and swelling. People stood and waited their turn to leave. The song was so entirely beautiful in its perfect sadness and its promise of consolation. A series of lifting phrases that raised the heart along with them. Bonnie, passing the pews, saw people crying new tears.

  Once they were safely in the vestibule, Bonnie and Haley leaned against a wall, shaking with nervous relief. “How did you hit on ‘Amazing Grace,’ or was that just luck?”

  “It was either that or the Rolling Stones.”

  “Would have been tricky, but we could have made it work.”

  “Maybe not ‘Brown Sugar.’”

  Bonnie tried to catch her breath. It was still running a block ahead of her, “The kids were great. Where’s Stan? We have to keep him from killing Charlie.”

  The rest of the crowd was coming out behind them now and there was a confusion of voices and people wanting to talk to them. Stan was on the other side of the room with his art friends, his money friends. He looked sad but Stan-like, his usual talky self. Bonnie supposed she ought to worry about Charlie, but she was tired of worrying about Charlie just now.

  A group of Claudia’s friends were offering condolences to Bonnie and Haley when Bonnie stiffened and touched Haley’s arm. “Look, I have to . . .”

  “Excuse me,” she called after the man who had pushed out of the chapel’s doors and was walking to the parking lot. He didn’t turn around. “Excuse me,” she tried again, but he only quickened his pace.

  “Hey, Rizzi!”

  He stopped then and she caught up with him. She said, “I get that you don’t want to talk to us. But once every thirty years or so isn’t asking a lot.”

  Carl Rizzi shrugged. “Didn’t want to intrude.”

  Now that she’d stopped him from getting away, she didn’t know what to say to him. They both looked out over the sunny afternoon. The wind had blown a few dry cornstalks in from a farm field and they scraped across the sidewalk. Carl Rizzi said, “I didn’t think anybody would recognize me.”

  “You look like my brother.” That is, he looked like Charlie would if he lived long enough to put in thirty more rough years. How old was he, close to seventy? Carl Rizzi was a tall man with a hunch in his back. His face had a leathery quality, especially around his eyes, which had receded into folds of skin. Some ghost of good looks still lived on in him. He had a full head of silver hair, going thin on top. His shoes had seen better days. His sports coat fit like something borrowed. He smelled like a million million cigarettes. She could see why he might not have wanted to intrude.

  “Yeah, your brother. How’s he doing?”

  “You saw how he’s doing.”

  “Charles,” he said, as if uncertain he had it right.

  “He goes by Charlie.”

  “He’s named after me, you know? Carl. I’m named after my dad. Carlo. There’s times I can’t place things right away. There’s a few holes in my brain. But I haven’t had a drink in five years. Almost six. Just so you know.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Something your brother ought to think about.”

  “Maybe you could help him with that,” Bonnie said. “Talk to him.”

  “It’s not something someone can do for you.” Carl Rizzi looked over his shoulder at the parking lot, then back to Bonnie. “So how’s everything with you?”

  “Fine,” she said, meaning, no thanks to him. “Look, I’m not trying to be obnoxious. But really, why are you here? You and my mom, you hadn’t been together for like, forever.”

  “We talked some. Every so often. Once the dust had settled.” He shrugged. “We were just kids when we got married, you know? She still had a soft spot for me.”

  “I guess you had one for her too.”

  “Just because things don’t work out, that doesn’t mean you lose all the feeling. She was a good woman. Too good for me. She had a good heart.”

  Not good enough, Bonnie thought. Carl Rizzi said, “Look, I really do have to get back.”

  “To Ohio.”

  “Yeah, Ohio.” He held out his hand and they shook. His hand was spare and hard. “You have my number, right? Tell your brother he can call me if he wants. We can talk the drunk talk. See if it takes.”

  “Thanks. I’ll let him know.”

  “You look good,” C
arl Rizzi said. “All dressed up and everything. You dodged the drunk curse, right?” He smiled. He was missing a tooth up front, in one corner of his mouth.

  “I’ve been thinking I should quit drinking. At least cut back.” She didn’t know why she told him. It wasn’t like it was any of his business.

  “If you think you should, then yes, you should. But your mother said you were all right. I did worry about you kids. The genetic predisposition. That’s what it’s called. I’m glad you didn’t inherit that godawful misery. All right, I’m out of here. Take care.”

  Bonnie watched him walk away across the parking lot. There was a slight hitch in his step, one leg gone stiff. She didn’t know if what she felt was loss, exactly, because how could you lose a father you never had in the first place? He had bequeathed her a different misery, a hunger for men who never stayed around.

  gps

  Jane was not unhappy with the way things were working out.

  At night she slept in the little spare room she’d arranged for herself. She told the children it was so she could hear them better if they needed her. Eric did not make objections. They no longer argued. They spoke about their children’s schedules and who would be where (at the dentist’s, at soccer practice), they conferred as needed about household accounts and taking the cars in for maintenance. Jane fixed Eric’s dinner along with everyone else’s and sometimes he was there to eat it and sometimes he was not. But he almost always arrived home by the children’s bedtime and read them their good-night stories and played good-night games. He was a fun daddy. Jane went to bed soon after the children and left Eric looking over paperwork in the den, his feet up, a drink beside him on the table, the television talking quietly to itself.

  She assumed that Eric saw Bonnie on those evenings when he arrived home late. Or some of those evenings. Maybe called her after Jane went to bed. Talked about whatever it was they talked about in between screwing. Jane didn’t pretend to know and she didn’t ask. Maybe they talked about Jane from time to time, although she hoped they had something more interesting to discuss.