by Joan Barfoot
Look at the empty chair at the table. Philip’s absence opens a huge space. There’s hope right there.
One person’s disaster is bound to be someone else’s triumph, that’s just how things are, isn’t it? Say you win a beauty pageant, or a modelling job, or release from a hospital: your victory depends on loss for some other people and there’s no way around it, so you might as well appreciate the success and build on the victory. Beth must put her best foot forward. Her mother used to say that, encouraging her to put your best foot forward on every occasion. Beth’s feet are narrow and long, their tendons prominent. As feet go, they look graceful. She extends her legs and regards her bare feet. She would be hard pressed to pick one as the best.
“What do we have to do today?” Nora asks. She is speaking, naturally, to Sophie, with that we she uses as if she had any intention of sharing the chores. Still, Sophie’s employment here, such as it is, must be coming undone, drifting loose, an attachment no more secure than a scarf tied in a bow with something pulling, none too gently, on one end.
“I have no idea. I suppose we’ll be hearing from the funeral home. The guy there said there’ll be forms to fill out, that sort of thing. If he doesn’t call by noon, I’ll drop in when I’m out shopping.”
“You’re going shopping?”
“Just to pick up a few things. Milk. Bread for sure. If there’s anything you want, just make a list.”
Because otherwise, it has occurred to Sophie, how to account for leaving the house? Which she has every intention of doing. One step at a time, that’s the trick to surviving practically everything. Partly because things not dealt with build up until they’re past any controllable point, and never mind wars, civil and otherwise—even in a household, and even in a tragic emergency, this applies.
Already some things are beyond doing: speaking proper last words, for one. That’s one terrible undone thing.
“How about you, Beth,” Nora asks, “do you have plans?”
Yes, but nothing to speak about yet, so she is relieved when the phone rings. Sophie answers, and says, “Yes,” and then, “Fine. I’m sure we can manage that. Of course. Thank you,” and when she hangs up, she tells Nora, “Everything’s going smoothly. That was the funeral home guy asking if we can get clothes to him in the next hour or so.”
“Smoothly?”
“You know—whatever they had to do to realize it was natural causes so things could get moving.”
“So they’ve decided for sure none of us caused Philip’s death.” Nora still cannot quite say die or dead out loud. Philip’s death is softer, and moreover makes it sound as if his death belongs only to him, and is therefore only his business, not anyone else’s, not even hers. “Too bad nobody was that interested in checking out whoever was leaving shit on the doorstep, but of course that was just cheery children’s idea of fun. Not like a coven casting spells on the man of the house.” Beth is surprised to see Sophie and Nora shoot bitter little grins at each other. Sometimes Beth can almost see jaggedy slices in the air between Nora and Sophie, then all of a sudden they’re grinning—how much does she miss just because of not happening to look at exactly the right moment? At least it’ll be easier without Philip’s signals, confusing and multi-directional; only two people to watch now. The hard part is figuring out what a word or a tone or an expression means. Which seems to keep changing anyway.
Nora, running a beat behind, frowns suddenly. “Wait a minute, clothes? For closed casket and cremation?” Yesterday morning Philip left the house inside a heavy black zippered bag, presumably still wearing the blue pyjama bottoms of which Nora had been wearing the top. So pathetic, so helpless—he would hate that.
No, Nora is not going to cry. Neither is Sophie, who shrugs. “It’s easier to do it than argue with the guy. Let’s just pick something.” Nora wants we? Sophie’ll give her we. Although not on the actual errand. “I can take them down to him, no problem.”
“Oh, God. I don’t know. He only had two suits and they’re years old, they probably don’t even fit any more.” Philip has been bulking up, Nora means. He has begun—had begun—the middle-aged thickening and settling process. He found this upsetting. “Shit,” he complained, standing naked, hands on hips, in front of the full-length bedroom mirrors, “I’m not putting on a whole lot of weight and I’m not doing anything different, so what’s going on?” His elegant shape, which once narrowed from broad chest to tight, slender hips, was turning blockish and solid.
“Gravity,” Nora had said from her perspective of bed. “Normal change.” What she found most interesting was that his penis seemed to be receding in the process; becoming something tender and fragile nestled in flesh, no longer a bold declaration. “One of these days I probably won’t have a waist any more. Same sort of thing.” She was only pointing out that they both had accommodations to make. She was suggesting that in making those accommodations, they were most safe, as well as most free, with each other. It was slightly disheartening, having to take the trouble to say this out loud. “We’ll be a pair,” she added, reinforcing the message and indeed, as best she could, spelling it out. In case he was in any danger of forgetting.
“I can pick something, if you’d like,” Sophie offers. “We need underwear, too, I gather, and socks. But no shoes.” No shoes. That’s entirely too vivid. That gives them all pause, even Beth.
“No!” That was loud. Nora is up on her feet. “I’ll do it.” Sophie invading Philip’s underwear drawer? Nora thinks not. “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” and she is off, out of the room, up the stairs—to be halted by something like a hand raised against her at her own bedroom door.
She knows the room beyond this door like the back of her hand. Better. It’s their house, so she and Philip have naturally had the largest of the three bedrooms. Since the arrivals of first Sophie, then Beth, it’s also been the only room that contains no outside tastes, no bits and pieces contributed, or left lying about, by the others. Neither does it contain any of Nora’s work, which was both her choice and Philip’s, although for different reasons. She wanted sanctuary, one place where work needn’t exist, except theoretically and in her mind’s eye. He said, “I’d like a peaceful room, nothing jarring,” which ruled out her work and other bright things.
So they wound up with a bedroom of cool blues and pale greys and ivory whites and various old shiny grained woods. Philip made the wide, deep bed himself, from maple rubbed and stained dark and, after so many years, marked and scratched here and there from one jostling and another. They bought a broad oak bureau, four drawers for each of them, and the blanket box from an ancient neighbour auctioning household possessions. Philip refinished them both. “Texture,” he said. “Grain. Very sexy, textures and grains.”
The mirrors before which they examined themselves and each other were also the sliding doors to their wall-to-wall closet, reflecting the two original, rectangular farmhouse windows, more or less doubling the size of the room and the view, too, with the grey draperies opened. The draperies have been closed for a day now. It’ll be dark in there. To Nora, halted out in the hallway, the room feels forbidding. Or forbidden. Which is crazy. She slams her hand into the door and once through, takes a deep breath. The air is stale: from being closed in, or from some deathly residue?
There was yesterday morning, the view, the touch, from the next pillow on that Philip-built bed over there. There are also infinite, uncountable moments of flinging arms, tangled limbs, random or purposeful encounters of shoulders, calves, hips and hands—years of this, night after night after night. Words and silences both, in their two particular voices.
Never again? No. This cannot have happened.
In the equal knowledge that it is not only possible but true, a separate cool part of Nora opens Philip’s side of the closet and selects a pair of tan cotton pants, a slim brown leather belt. What he might have worn yesterday, if they’d driven off on the day they had planned. A crisp blue cotton shirt he might have worked in, did work in. No
tie. A lightweight navy-blue sports coat. He would look, oh, full in these clothes. A large man leaning back in his chair at the end of a long restaurant lunch with Nora and Max, the three of them comfortable and familiar, stimulated and cheerful. She sees that restaurant scene as clearly as if it had been their real yesterday.
There is something to be said for touching his things. Perhaps that’s what Sophie really intended, suggesting they sort through his possessions: that this is as close as anyone can come any more. But throw out the contents of his closet and drawers, give them away, find them new homes and new bodies? Sophie goes too far there. With her arms around Philip’s empty tan pants and blue shirt, the clothes that will burn with him, Nora lets herself sag onto the bed. Jumps straight back up. This bed, no!
Philip’s boxers are piled and jumbled in the top bureau drawer. She picks a pale blue pair with a frivolous pattern of sailboats. “Climb aboard, matey,” Philip cried the first time he wore them, his thighs emerging like a couple of tree trunks, his hands on his hips as he stood at the foot of the bed, his head rolling back as he laughed; that joyous, absent roar.
Navy socks to match the sports jacket, she supposes, not black. And no shoes. Poor Philip, with nowhere to go; a tenderfoot, in only his socks. Tiptoeing through hell, his infinite punishment for sneaking off in the night.
She tastes something acidic as, embracing Philip’s last outfit, she leaves the bedroom, closing the door sharply behind her. At the bottom of the stairs Sophie waits, now in beige pants and pale yellow blouse, evidently not in mourning today, hair blazing red and arms outstretched: ready as ever to receive and accept Nora’s burdens.
Eight
Anyone, even a taxi, even Beth for heaven’s sake, could deliver Phil’s clothes to Hendrik Anderson, but it’s Sophie who marches off with the little blue gym bag and a letter signed by Nora, witnessed by Beth, authorizing Sophie to handle arrangements.
Or, as she imagines, do battle.
Sophie pictures Hendrik Anderson as a man roughly her own age, neither tentative nor settled yet into deep immovable years. In her mind he has short hair and wears a dark pinstriped suit and discreet, well-shined shoes; his shape is narrow, elongated, slightly stooped. This impression comes partly from stereotype, but also from his voice on the phone, which sounds as if it’s been strained and stretched for a long, thin, sombre distance.
It sounds priggish, too, and disapproving. Not that Sophie herself likes Nora’s plans for Phil’s swift disposal, but who is an undertaker, basically, but a service person, no different from the plumber who periodically cleans tree roots out of the drains, paid for his skills and equipment, not for nagging commentary on the damage large trees can do. Sophie got Nora and Phil to switch plumbers last year for that very reason.
One does not so lightly switch undertakers. One can go forth, though, with clear and unbending intentions. Sophie plans to rely on his decorum, their equivalency of age and authority, her careful outfitting in clothes that do not signal deep mourning and her own bright magnitude.
Or if necessary her absolute intention not to be thwarted.
Is her plan a good or a bad one? One good thing about it is that she does not actually care—that’s how far she has managed to travel in four years, just by staying still and quiet.
The small, black-lettered sign outside says simply, ANDERSON AND SONS, and scarcely needs to say more. Lawns with two precise and dignified front beds of geraniums and impatiens, the high dark-rimmed windows, the size and sprawl of the red-bricked building itself with its hovering side portico for sheltering people and very large cars, combine to announce that this is what it is.
Somewhere inside this terrible building is Phil.
Also he keeps pace overhead, keeping watch, urging her on.
The ornate, wide, wooden front doors are heavy—however do the frail or the elderly manage them?—then inside comes the sudden silence of a different world all its own: of chilled and dimly unnatural light, of dark woods and ivory wallpaper with faint ferny-green tracings, of dark red, worn carpet runner underfoot, of—she can’t say what exactly, but something like reverence.
Can she do this?
Just watch her.
A discreet buzzer has sounded with the opening and closing of the door. Now here’s the surprise: from a doorway along to the right bounds a blond open-faced man in blue jeans and smudged baseball-team T-shirt, hand outstretched like a pudgy salesman, and fifty if he’s a day. Not remotely who she’s looking for. “Hello, I’m Hendrik Anderson,” he says, and the voice confirms this is so. “Pardon the outfit. I was trying to catch up with my garden.”
Is that obsessive—digging one way or another in one sort of soil, potential soil, or another? What’s that under his fingernails?
He’s shorter than Sophie. Men often are, she is used to casting eyes downwards over a view of foreheads and scalps, as their eyes are cast upwards. She prefers not having to do this. She does not care to loom. And with men who are taller than she, there’s a nice sense of being protected, even if protection is unsought. Or untrue. Look at Phil.
To look at Phil is why Sophie is here.
“I am sorry,” says this chubby, blue-eyed, professional observer of grief, “for your loss. It must be a shock. And for the widow. An unhappy business but, as I’ve said, I’m here to make it easier, at least in the most practical ways.” This sounds less unctuous face to face than it did over the phone. “Anything I can do.”
She thrusts the gym bag and Nora’s note into his hands. Sink or swim. “There is something you can do, as a matter of fact. I want to see him.”
He steps back. Looks at his watch. “If you come back late this afternoon, that should be possible. If you’ve decided to hold a visitation after all, I expect we could be prepared by then.”
“No. I mean now.”
His mouth loops into a downturn of distress. “I beg your pardon? Do you mean you want to see him now? Oh, but I’m afraid, no, he isn’t prepared, not by any means. In a few hours, but now, no.” This must be a hard line of work. Although he chose it, and why would a person decide to make a living moulding cold stony flesh? In times and places of disease and starvation and violent hatred, there are acknowledgements of griefs, yes, but not so much in the way of elaborately manufactured arrangement of feature and limb. There are brief, desperate, profound obeisances to mortality and that’s it. Less than that, even, in times and places of slaughter. This man is lucky, whether he knows it or not. Probably not. People don’t.
“Now,” Sophie repeats. She thinks if he were as adamant as he sounds, or as adamant as she is, his mouth would not look distressed.
“I’m so sorry, but he’s not even in an area open to the public.” As if that is the most compelling argument he can make. Do mourners, or just people with secrets, never make odd demands? Do they, for instance, not sometimes express a desire to regard the dead as they are, not as they could be once made false and presentable?
On the other hand, if his profession is death, it must also be life. The lives, specifically, of the bereaved, most of whom likely do require protection from the most raw and bare aspects of their bereavements.
Which has nothing to do with Sophie.
Still, she is disarmed by appearance: that he is not what she expected. This Hendrik Anderson could belong to any glad-handing service club in the town—and is there a code of ethics for people who run funeral homes, to do with the privacies and indiscretions of mourners? Otherwise how irresistible to whisper tales of not only the non-wife’s unusual role in arranging proceedings and delivering clothes, but also of the same non-wife’s tasteless and unnatural insistence on viewing the unprepared body. Even if he only told a couple of people, word would spread like Ebola, mutating freakishly along the way. That’s how things work here.
Well, anywhere, really. And does Sophie care? Not much. If she needs to, she will barge through the place, banging into one room after another in undignified, inflammatory search of Phil, with a fluste
red Hendrik Anderson skittering along at her heels. Of course, she would prefer not to do that. “Please,” she says. “I realize it’s unusual but honestly, dead bodies don’t shock me.” Well, he’ll wonder and speculate about that, won’t he? “I won’t be upset, and I won’t tell a soul. It’s a great favour, I know, but please. Trust me.”
Trust her? Why on earth would he? She touches his arm. She intends to look, not begging exactly, but plaintive and sad and also respectably in control of herself. A woman seeking one small morsel of help which only he can deliver. “Really,” he says, “you don’t know the state of things at the moment.” He frowns, but it’s hard for a man peering upwards to appear forbidding to Sophie. “I’m sorry to put it so bluntly but it’s not nice, a body that’s been examined but hasn’t yet been prepared.”
No doubt. “I can imagine,” she says, although she can’t, quite. “I know,” although she does not. “I can take that into account.”
“After, frankly, you understand, an autopsy?” He’s spelling it out and watching her closely, as if he supposes it possible to read fortitude or ghoulishness or cheap curiosity in expressions and eyes. Or he’s challenging her; and it’s true, the word autopsy is daunting.
“I’m very sure.” She makes her eyes large. “I understand your concerns, but please believe me, I will manage perfectly well, and you’d be doing such a good deed.” Her hand tightens slightly on his arm. These impure, necessary tricks—what others does she still have? Phil didn’t need tricks, only lies.
She can see a shift occurring, there’s a small loosening of muscle in the arm she is touching, a clearing of eyes, a relaxation of mouth. Hendrik Anderson sighs. “Well, it’s against every rule, and I think extremely unwise, but … I am aware that you have experience in some of the harsher aspects of death.” She should have known—people do hear the histories, however garbled, of other people in this town. “And I understand how things left up in the air can be the worst part of death, in a way, in the long run.” What does he imagine has been left up in the air? Never mind. At least he’s familiar with the debris that bobs along behind death, its sharp bits sticking up into the living, refusing to sink. He sighs again, lifts his hands, lets them fall. “Follow me, then.”
