by Liz Miles
Nude Descending a Staircase
BY JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN
Dead
THE PHONE RANG in my mother’s house. It was Aunt Nora. She said, “Eleanor, you’ll never believe what happened. I just died.”
My mother checked the clock. It was late. “Nora,” she said. “What are you talking about?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Aunt Nora continued. “But listen. I’m dead now.” She paused. “Don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
“Nora,” my mother said. “You’re not making any sense. Of course you’re not dead. You’re on the phone.”
My aunt made an irritated sound. “I knew you’d act like this. I knew it!”
“Nora. Are you listening to me? I want you to put the phone down. I want you to go get yourself a glass of milk. Will you do that for me, please?”
“You want I should get some milk?”
“Put the phone down and get yourself a glass of milk. When you have the milk, come back to the phone.”
My aunt put the phone down begrudgingly. My mother, alone in her big house, sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the sounds of Nora moving around her apartment. Whatever it was she was doing, it was clear she hadn’t traveled in a straight line to the refrigerator. My mother heard furniture moving, a toilet flushing. Aunt Nora was singing something to herself.
My mother thought about hanging up and calling me. Aunt Nora and I had been close when I was little. She was going to name me after her, in fact, until my father talked her into calling me Jennifer. Still, Nora and I had an understanding. We were both a little crazy.
But Aunt Nora was more than a little crazy by the time she called my mother and announced her own end. “I have the milk, Eleanor,” she said. “I’m still dead.”
“Did you drink it?” my mother asked. “Did you drink the milk?”
“I drank it. It tastes like milk.” There was a pause. “Being dead doesn’t change the way things taste.”
“Nora,” my mother said. “I want you to stop. I want you to drink the milk and go to sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”
“Why should I need sleep?” Aunt Nora said. “I’m dead. I’m not tired.”
“Just drink your milk and go to bed. Will you do that?”
“All right,” my aunt said, unconvinced. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
My mother hung up the phone. It wasn’t exactly unusual for Aunt Nora to talk like this. All of my mother’s brothers and sisters were troubled. Shamus had frozen to death on a freight train in Oregon. Caeli lived above a liquor store in Boston, and played one of those electric organs that supplied its own percussion. Sean, who no one had seen for seven or eight years, was rumored to have swelled up to the size of a bus, mainly because he was working as a night watchman and sat around eating potato chips. My mother was normal, almost exaggeratedly so, which in some ways made her the craziest of all of them.
Aunt Nora was the oldest. She was the only one who remembered the Civil War. The family had emigrated to America through Ellis Island in 1925, spent a couple of years in Boston, then decided to go back to Galway. By the time they got back, Ireland was down the drain. So they turned around again and came back to the States. A week after that my grandfather deserted the family for good. He turned up forty years later in the New York City morgue. He’d died on the Bowery with my Aunt Nora’s address and phone number in his pocket.
My mother and Nora were the ones who had to go and identify the body. They didn’t tell my sister Lydia or me about it. They took the train up to New York City and walked from Penn Station over to the morgue, which is on East 33rd Street. There’s a big sign in the lobby in Latin. Loosely translated, it means, “Here is the place where all laughter stops. This is the place where the dead bring life to the living.”
They were led into a room and the body was rolled out in its drawer. He had long, greasy, dirty hair. My mother couldn’t say for sure whether it was her father or not. She hadn’t seen him since she was a teenager. But then they noticed that his middle finger on the right hand was missing above the knuckle; he’d lost it in an auto body plant in the twenties. On the basis of this, they nodded. It was him, all right.
The medical examiner wanted to know what they wanted done. We don’t want him, the sisters concluded. He abandoned us our whole lives. Now that he’s dead, we’ll abandon him.
So my grandfather was buried in a pauper’s grave on Hart Island, in New York’s Upper Harbor. The island is New York’s potter’s field, operated by the Department of Corrections. Prisoners in orange uniforms bury the dead in pine coffins in a long row, six coffins piled one on top of the other. Guards stand there with their guns trained on the gravediggers. I wrote a story about Hart Island one time. Most of the facts I got right, but I also threw in some stuff about a girl who’s lost her father. At the end of the story, a chimpanzee wearing the father’s clothes comes in on a unicycle and teeters in the moonlight.
The morning after my mother got the phone call from Aunt Nora, she got up, drank her coffee, then called her back. Nobody answered the phone. A few hours later, my mother finally called up her friend Happy and the two of them went over to my aunt’s apartment to see what was what. They got to Nora’s place and rang the bell. No one answered.
My mother had the key. She opened the door.
The place was empty.
For a while my mother and Happy combed through Nora’s apartment, nervously searching for signs. But there weren’t any. Aunt Nora was gone. Which was very strange, since she did not drive and did not like to leave the house even to walk around the block. Sunshine made her chilly.
Finally, one of them found a small piece of paper, which explained that an ambulance had been there during the night. Happy called the hospital. Aunt Nora had been admitted. Apparently she’d had the wherewithal, at some point, to call 911 and explain the situation.
It was mid-afternoon before my mother finally arrived at Bryn Mawr Hospital. There was my Aunt Nora, tied to her bed. She broke down in tears when she saw her sister.
“Eleanor, I’m so sorry,” she said. “The milk didn’t work.”
Mardi Gras
The year I turned fifteen, my parents announced their intention of going to Mardi Gras, and leaving my sister Lydia and me at home alone, unsupervised. We were old enough to be trusted, they said. But in this they were wrong.
“So we’re going to be totally on our own,” my sister said, reviewing the facts. I could see that her thoughts were not unlike my own. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Well, your Aunt Nora will stay here during the evenings,” my mother said. “Just to make sure you’re safe.”
The announcement that Aunt Nora would be present did not immediately dislodge our plans to have the world’s biggest party while my parents were gone. For some reason, we figured she’d be fine with it.
Aunt Nora was at work at the Bridal Salon when our party started. There was Darryl and his older brother Jonathan. There was Anne Niemeyer, who could ignite her own farts with a butane lighter. There was Dominique Leith, who had had three abortions. There was Lisa Yarrow, who had a Volkswagen and a pet rabbit. There were Lee Monahan and Steve Moe Hunter, who had bandanas. And there was Perry van Roden, who had been held back a grade for reasons that were not clear. I wanted with all my heart to get someplace alone with Perry. As night descended upon my parents’ house, I realized that all I really wanted out of the impending bloodbath was for Perry to put one hand on my cheek and kiss me. “Jenny,” he’d say. “You’re so pretty.”
By eight o’clock, there were perhaps a hundred ninth and tenth graders out of control in the house. I only knew about a dozen of them. Teenagers were descending on the house like crows dropping down on roadkill.
Kerrill Ferguson—who had a cool mom—had provided the keg. He walked around asking people for money for it. He kept at it for so long that in the end he made some money off t
he deal. Now and again he went over to the keg with a paternal demeanor and lovingly agitated its pressure pump with his large and hairy forearms.
My sister had disappeared early in the evening, and at about nine o’clock I went looking for her. I went up the long stairs to the third floor and found Perry van Roden alone in my room painting a mural on my bedroom wall with oil paints. He was singing some Rolling Stones song to himself as he painted. “You gotta move!” he sang. “You gotta move!” After taking a good look at the mural he was drunkenly painting, I realized he was right. We were going to have to move.
“Perry,” I said. “What are you doing?”
He grinned. “Everythink’s yalla,” he said. It was clear enough: Perry was absolutely drunk. “Everythink’s green.”
Perry reached down and squeezed another tube of oil paint on to his hand. He squeezed it so hard the paint made splattering noises as the air glurted out of the tube. He scratched his cheek with this same hand, and a giant glob of blue paint now smeared across it.
“Ugg,” he said. “Everythink’s bloooooo.”
“Perry,” I said. “You want me to go get like some aspirin or something?”
He looked startled. “Aspirin,” he said, and started laughing. “Aspirin!” Perry van Roden’s knees buckled and he fell to the floor laughing.
“Perry,” I said, kneeling down toward him. “Get up. Please.”
He opened his eyes, and then reached up for my face with one hand, and drew me down to him, and we kissed. It was nice, the kiss. But it was not exactly what I’d had in mind.
“C’mon Lydia,” he said softly. “Let’s do it.”
I pulled back. Lydia?
“It’s me,” I explained. “Jenny?”
“Lydia,” Perry said again, and pulled me toward him. We kissed again, but to be honest, being called by my sister’s name kind of wrecked it.
At that moment, from downstairs, I heard my aunt’s voice. “Jennifer,” she said. “Jennifer, come down here.”
I left Perry laughing on the floor. I walked down the creaking stairs to find Aunt Nora standing in the hallway. She looked small and frightened.
“Jennifer,” she said. “Where is your sister?Who are all these people?”
I didn’t know what to tell her. They were good questions.
“Did your parents say it was all right for you to have this many friends over?” she asked, unsure. “I don’t remember anyone saying anything about this.”
From upstairs, suddenly, came the sound of a door swinging open. “Lydia,” a voice moaned. “Lydia.”
A moment later, Perry van Roden appeared. He was only wearing his underwear. Streaks of oil paint were smeared all over his body.
“Lydia,” he moaned. “C’mon! Let’s do it!”
My aunt screamed. A moment later she ran into my parents’ bedroom. I heard the door lock behind her. It sounded like she was weeping.
I stood where I was, aware of the degree of trouble I was now in, alone. A moment later Perry van Roden, my love, reached the bottom of the stairs, and moved forward to embrace me. I was fifteen-years-old, my aunt was calling my parents long distance, and I was holding an almost naked boy in my arms for the first time. He buried his face in my hair.
“Oh, Lydia,” Perry moaned, stroking my face. “I’ll love ya till the day you die.”
Plums
There was a three-year interval between the time that Aunt Nora decided she’d died and the time that she actually did. She spent the time in between in a series of hospitals, each one less cheerful than the one before. My mother and I would visit her, walk her around the ward. She’d whisper to us, “Watch yourself. Some of the people in here are really strange.” One time we sat in a kind of courtyard next to another couple who was visiting a woman in a wheelchair with a tracheotomy. Every now and then mucus would burst suddenly out of a hole in the woman’s neck. Aunt Nora sighed and suddenly imitated the entertainer Jimmy Durante. “It’s humiliatin’,” she said. “It’s mortifyin’!”
My mother and I weren’t sure who’d make it to the funeral. She didn’t have many friends left. When we got to the funeral home my cousin Declan, Caeli’s son, was standing there in a blue suit and a long ponytail. Declan is about ten years older than me. During the war he went to Canada. By the time Carter gave everybody amnesty, he’d acquired some unusual beliefs. For one thing, he only ate plums. For another, he spent about two months out of every year living in the desert in Mexico eating the hallucinogenic cactus, peyote. For all that, he was a respected scientist. He wound up teaching organic chemistry at Sarah Lawrence.
We walked across the room to say hello to cousin Declan. The only thing in the room besides the three of us was my aunt Nora, stretched out in a casket and wearing makeup. The night before, the funeral home had called us and asked us for a photograph of Aunt Nora. So they’d know what she was supposed to look like. It took us a while to find one that worked, since Aunt Nora hadn’t looked like she was supposed to look like for a long time. My mother, turning boxes of photographs upside down, had muttered, “She never looked like she was supposed to have looked like.”
Cousin Declan hugged my mother. “She’s okay,” he said. “She’s part of the universe now.”
Declan and I shook hands. We hadn’t seen each other since his first wedding, more than twenty years earlier. “How’ve you been, Jenny?” he asked me.
“Good,” I told him. “I’m good.”
We stood there for a while, the three of us, then we turned to look at Aunt Nora, all stretched out. We didn’t say anything. After a little while my mother started to cry. She ran her fingers through Aunt Nora’s hair.
“Poor thing,” she said.
Later, we all drove out to the cemetery. While we sat in our limo, my mother laughed suddenly. We looked at her. She said, “You know, I was just thinking of that song Nora used to sing when she was in the hospital. You remember the one? ‘Where Am I Going to Live When I Get Home?’”
She started to sing it. It sounded like a country and western song.
Where am I going to live when I get home?
My wife threw out everything I own.
She ain’t what she said.
I wish that I was dead.
Where am I going to live when I get home?
“Well,” cousin Declan said. “She knows now. All right?” The phrase “All right?” asked as a rhetorical question turned out to be one of my cousin’s signatures. I wondered if he’d picked it up in Canada.
My mother just shook her head. “It’s funny,” she said. “There was a time in her life when she was a happy person.”
We stared out the windows. It was raining. We didn’t talk for while.
“The Yaqui Indians have a name for a day like this,” said cousin Declan as we pulled into the cemetery.
“Yeah?” I said. “What’s that?”
“Minas Derendah,” he said.
“What’s that mean?” The car stopped. A man with an umbrella opened the door.
“It’s kind of hard to translate,” cousin Declan said. “All right?”
After the ceremony we went to a local brew pub called John Harvard’s. Years earlier it had been called The Covered Wagon. I’d had my senior prom there. Before that I’d seen Count Basie and his orchestra perform in the same place. The spot where the Count’s piano had once been was now occupied by an enormous copper kettle containing thousands of gallons of ale.
“So, Eleanor,” cousin Declan said, after our beers had arrived. “I wanted to tell you I’m getting married.”
“You are?” said my mother. “That’s great. Who to?”
“This woman,” cousin Declan said. “I met her on a vision quest.”
We all sat there in silence for a while. There was a table of secretaries next to us who all burst into laughter at something. Finally my mother said, “Well. Isn’t that nice.”
“I wanted to invite you to the wedding.” He looked over at me. “You, too, Jenny. If you wa
nt. It’s going to be in California. During the equinox.”
“The equinox,” my mother said. “And when is that again?”
“September twenty-first,” said cousin Declan. “I want you to be there if you’d like to come. You should know, though, we’re going to have a vision quest as part of the ceremony. All right? I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
“Of course I wouldn’t be uncomfortable at a vision quest,” my mother said. “Not if it makes you happy.” She supped her beer, then thought about it. “Now what would this involve exactly?”
Declan chose his words carefully. “Well, we’ll all be camping out. This is near Big Sur. The ceremony itself will be performed by a shaman in a teepee. Then we sit in the sweat lodge.”
“A sweat lodge,” my mother said, fascinated. “Jenny, have you ever been in a sweat lodge?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Oh, wait,” my mother said. “September twenty-first is the Philadelphia Flower Show. Darn it.” She looked at me. “Jenny, you’ll just have to represent the family.”
Declan finished his beer. For a guy who ate only plums, I thought, he sure could put away the beers. “What do you think?” said my cousin. “Can you make it?” He smiled strangely. “I’m telling you, it’ll be something to remember! All right?”
“All right,” I said, and at that moment saw the future in all its completeness.
Seven months later, I was in a teepee by the Pacific Ocean watching cousin Declan exchange vows with a woman named Dakota. I was wearing a long blue dress. You could hear the waves hitting the shore as the two of them said their vows. As it turned out the ceremony wasn’t all that mystical—the shaman read from the Book of Common Prayer.
After the wedding, a big fire was lit outside and people danced around it playing drums. Cousin Declan came over to me and gave me a giant hug. I could feel his ribs through his poncho. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “You and me, we’re the last of the Mohicans, all right?”
