by Grant Ginder
All she says is “I got rid of them, too.”
February 10, 2012
Janice reaches forward from the second pew and hands Donna a balled-up Kleenex.
“You’ve got some mascara on your cheeks, hon,” she whispers.
“What? Oh, geez.”
Donna dabs at her eyes, even though she knows it’s useless; she’ll start sobbing again just as soon as the service begins, which will be any minute now. Next to her, Eloise wraps and unwraps her own tissue around her middle finger. Her cheeks are flushed and damp, though still, even under the weight of her grief, she maintains a dignified posture, her shoulders pulled back and her spine elongated. Donna watches her daughter as she stares at a spot on the stairs leading up to the altar, where a blown-up, framed picture of Bill stands between two vases stuffed with lilies. She had a hard time deciding on it. Initially, she wanted to find a photo of him right before he died—or, at least, right before the cancer hit. Something that caught how people most recently remembered him. It seemed crass to throw up some glamour shot of her husband from thirty years ago, she thought; some athletic portrait where he appeared farthest from what he lately was, which was broken and in the early stages of decay. But finding evidence of the most recent Bill proved to be harder than she expected; over the past few years, they’d had little occasion to take pictures. Their children were all grown, all living independent, separate existences in different states and foreign countries. And their own lives—Donna’s and Bill’s—hardly required documentation; their weekends were most often spent trying to conceive of ways of acknowledging each other’s company while staying in separate rooms. The pictures they did have were awkward or blurry—snapshots that were taken reluctantly, with the knowledge that this would be one more thing they’d have to find a place for, one more object they’d have to file away.
And so she’d gone against her initial intuition. She chose a picture of him from thirty-some-odd years ago, when he still had a full head of chestnut hair, and his face wasn’t bloated or creased. He must have been thirty-four, she figured. Maybe thirty-five? He was wearing waders and a canvas vest covered in fishhooks. A craggy, dust-colored peak loomed in the background. It was their honeymoon. A camping trip to somewhere in Yellowstone. It had been his idea. She hadn’t been camping since an ill-fated Girl Scout trip in junior high school, and privately she wasn’t too keen on giving the whole thing another go. Still, though, she’d agreed. She reasoned that Bill was a new start—not just for her, but for Eloise—and camping was just about the furthest thing away from Henrique.
There were bugs, she remembers. Bugs, and strange phantom sounds that kept her up at night. Wind brushing the loose fabric of the tent. The sense of a million eyes watching her when she crept out to pee. She hardly slept. She wishes she’d chosen another picture.
The priest speaks about Bill fighting admirably against the sickness that took him, about him being in God’s hands now, and about faith being a bedrock. His voice is too lulling. Donna worries that the hundred or so people who’ve gathered to pay their respects to her husband might drift off and fall asleep. She tries to remember the last time she and Bill were in this church. A decade ago, probably. Could easily be more. She wonders how the priest cobbles together his eulogies in situations like this: if he has a stash of ecclesiastical Mad Libs for those occurrences when he has to preside over the death of a total stranger.
She thinks of her children. She wants to drill inside their heads, to split them open and excavate their thoughts. She wants to know what they are feeling, and what forms those feelings take. Are they enduring the same bowel-loosening cocktail of heartbreak, memory, grief, and, above all, regret? Do they, too, feel daunted by the years of obscure and shapeless loneliness that now lie before them? And amid all that, do they find themselves clinging to the unexpected and sickening bits of pleasure that come from having a dead father? All that wonderful sympathy and attention?
Eloise reaches over to hold Alice’s hand: Alice, whose eyes are enviously dull, Donna thinks, like she’s watching a rerun on mute. Over a sullen breakfast that morning, Paul accused her of taking more Klonopin than what her doctors in Mexico City had prescribed.
“I saw you this morning in the bathroom,” he yelled, throwing two cold eggs and a piece of toast into the trash compactor. “It’s like you want to look like some dead, lifeless fish at your own dad’s service.”
“It’s a funeral, Paul,” Alice had said. “What were you hoping I’d do, the fucking Macarena?”
Donna had tried halfheartedly to prevent a fight from erupting, and when Eloise stepped in to play peacemaker, she’d slipped upstairs to the bathroom that Paul and Alice shared. She rummaged through the amber vials in her daughter’s toiletries bag until she found one labeled Clonazepam (generic for Klonopin), and, unscrewing the childproof top, she shook three of the tiny yellow pills onto her palm. Paul and Alice continued fighting directly below her—their voices pressed up against her feet—as she neatly lined the Klonopin up along the center of her tongue. In a moment she felt the tablets melting, mixing with her saliva. They tasted sweet, which surprised her, not at all chalky and medicinal, like aspirin, but more like cheap drugstore candy. But then something gripped her. Responsibility, she figured. Or, perhaps more accurately: guilt. She spit the pills into the toilet bowl and watched as they danced toward the bottom, staining the water gold.
“And now it’s my understanding that we’ve got some folks who’d like to say a few words about Bill.”
Feedback whines over the speakers.
The priest adjusts the microphone pinned to his robe.
“And so first I’d like to introduce Bill’s son, Paul Wesley Wyckoff.”
Contained and apprehensive applause ripples through the church. At the far end of the pew, Paul stands up and quickly brushes the wrinkles from his suit. In his right hand he clutches a set of papers—a speech—folded in half.
“Hello,” he says, once he reaches the podium. “I, uh. Excuse me.” He unfolds the speech. His voice cracks.
Donna wishes she’d taken Alice’s pills when she had the chance. Because now her spine sweats and bile churns at the base of her throat. She swallows hard, and worries that she might vomit.
April 5, 2008
Donna hangs up the phone.
“Well, there you have it,” she calls into the kitchen. When Paul called, he asked if both his parents could be on the phone. Donna took the old one in the living room, and Bill cradled the cordless next to the stove.
She looks at the vase of hydrangeas sitting on the coffee table and waits for her husband to say something.
When he doesn’t, she says: “At least now we can stop pretending to be interested whenever he talks about some girl he’s just met.”
Looking at her nails, she frowns: they’re a mess. A bunch of chipped paint and shreds of ragged cuticle skin. She’ll drive to the Charlestowne Mall tomorrow and get a manicure.
Bill appears in the doorway that leads from the living room to the kitchen. He’s poured two glasses of red wine, big ones, and she can tell he’s already had one without her. He frowns at something imperceptible; he moves with drunk determination.
“I can’t believe it,” he says.
“What, that Paul’s gay?” Donna reaches forward and readjusts the vase; the hydrangeas were off-center. “Oh please, Bill. He collected My Little Ponies as a kid. His favorite movie was Sister Act.”
Bill collapses into his armchair—an old leather mound with a torn back that Donna’s been waging a war of attrition against since they got married.
“Maybe he’ll grow out of it,” he says.
“I can’t tell if you’re kidding or not.”
He swallows half his glass of wine and sets it on a side table, next to a copy of the second volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson.
“He needs to grow out of it,” he says this time.
Donna balks. “I’m sorry, what is this? Nineteen fifty-seven?
Is Eisenhower still president? Our son’s gay, Bill. People are gay. THERE ARE GAYS AMONG US. You were fine when Dick and Judy Parsons’s daughter came out as a lesbian, why—”
“That wasn’t our own kid. And lower your voice.”
“What, you’re afraid that the neighbors might hear us?” She stares at her glass of wine, but she doesn’t touch it; she’s too infuriated to drink. “We’ve talked about this. When he was sixteen and we thought there might be a chance, we talked about what we’d do if he ever came out.”
Bill shakes his head. “That was all just speculation. It wasn’t real. This—this is real.”
“He was hoarding copies of International Male catalogs beneath his bed!”
“You were snooping.”
Donna wants to scream. Instead, she grabs the nearest throw pillow and presses it against her face, breathing into the frayed silk. That tone that she so hates has begun to creep into his voice; a cadence and tenor that reminds her of the way her own father kept her mother in check. You and the kids can play like you’re in charge—that’s what she knows he’s actually saying. But at the end of the day, I pay the bills.
Bill clears his throat.
“He needs to figure this out before he comes home again.”
Donna lowers the pillow.
“Figure what out? This is nuts.”
“He needs to get over this ‘I’m gay’ crap. Until that happens, he’s not welcome here.”
She doesn’t know whether to laugh or throw the vase at him, hydrangeas and all. Studying his face, she waits for him to take it back, to soften the blow, to realize his own sudden absurdity.
And when he doesn’t, she simply says: “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said no, Bill. No. He’s our son. He can come home whenever he damned well pleases.”
“Donna, I pay the mortgage here. I pay—”
“Oh, you pay, you pay, you pay. And what, you think that puts you in charge?”
He starts to say something, but she has no interest in hearing it.
“I see you sitting there, in that godawful chair, thinking that you’re somehow brave for … for I don’t know what, to be honest. For sticking to your guns? For suddenly deciding to have a belief about something? Well, you’re not, Bill. And I don’t have a problem telling you that. You’re acting gutless, and that’s the truth. You’re acting like a goddamned coward.”
He finishes his wine and crosses one leg over the other. She wonders how long that stupid biography of Johnson has been sitting there. She wonders if he’ll ever get around to reading it.
“And what, you think you’re being some liberal hero? Allowing our son to choose this life for himself?”
“No one’s choosing anything. And no, I’m not a hero, Bill. You accept your son for who he is and where he’s at not because you’re heroic, but because you love him.”
She stands up and reaches for her glass of wine.
“I haven’t changed my mind,” he says. “He gets this taken care of, or he doesn’t come home.”
Donna drinks, swallows, and runs her tongue across her teeth.
She says, “Yeah? Then how about this: Unless you wake the fuck up from this bigoted, Neanderthal dream of yours, I’m leaving you. You got that? I’m out of here, and I’ll tell the kids exactly why I left.”
She finishes her wine and watches the color slowly drain from his face.
February 10, 2012
Paul sobs through the last paragraph of his eulogy, and so does everyone else. As Donna watches them, she begins to cry herself, though for reasons only she can understand. She hadn’t left Bill, though perhaps she should have. The truth is that he loved her more than she loved him—that had always been the case, and it always would be—and she used that terrible fact to her advantage when she blackmailed him two years ago. You wouldn’t leave me, he’d said, testing her when she threatened. Oh, yes, she’d responded, I would. They’d both known that she’d meant it, too. Because like all relationships, theirs was one in which one party had settled; in which, in the event of some dissolution, one party would leave with less heartache, less anguish, less personal unraveling. And that party, of course, was her. She’d thrown her ace on the table, and now Bill faced the awful reality of loss.
What did she want him to do, he asked. How could he get her to stay?
“Don’t ever mention this conversation” is what she’d said. “You act happy when you see him. You love him like you’ve always loved him. I don’t care if you have to pretend. You do what you need to do.”
He agreed. It was a bitter resignation, but she didn’t care; she knew that the unbalanced nature of their love would compel Bill to keep his word, no matter how spiteful he became, and that was all the assurance Donna needed. Paul was a fragile and sentimental boy who had grown into a slightly less fragile and sentimental man, someone who lived in romantic superlatives, that the truth could so readily destroy. Still, watching him now as he descends the shallow stairs from the pulpit, his shoulders folding in on themselves, Donna wonders if she did the right thing.
They had been close, after all. While Paul had gravitated toward Donna when he was a boy, when he reached adolescence he withdrew from her and began spending more time with Bill. At first she was hurt—in so many ways she’d come to view Paul as special, a more exact mirror of her than Alice had ever been—but in time she quietly accepted the shift in alliances. She understood that Paul craved a masculine energy, something that could reaffirm the parts of himself that he’d suddenly begun to doubt. And so, she let him go.
Alice stands as Paul returns to the pew. She holds him as he cries, his body convulsing.
As for Donna, she’s only told one person of that awful agreement she and Bill had made: Eloise. It happened two nights before her husband died, when the doctors informed her his death was imminent and her children, at her urging, flew back to Chicago. Paul and Alice had left the hospital for the evening, but Eloise remained at Bill’s bedside with Donna, where they both watched him sleep, his skin already gray and cold. Listening to the incessant chirping of the machines that were tracking Bill’s death, Donna wrestled with what to say to her daughter. She knew she had to tell someone. For the past four years, she had felt the secret slowly eating at her. It existed on the fringes of whatever wan happiness she felt, threatening always to flood in; she’d be in the garden, enjoying herself, when she’d suddenly remember the deception that belied that brief moment of peace. Briefly, she’d considered telling Alice, but that thought quickly faded. She knew the fierce loyalty that Alice felt toward Paul, as well as her father; the news would thrust her into an impossible position. For better or worse, though, Eloise floated along the peripheries of those relationships. No matter how hard she tried to crack Paul and Alice, they wouldn’t let her in. Instead, they were content to relegate her to a pedestal—but a pedestal built of spite and malice. Watching her eldest daughter try to find equal footing with her half siblings used to break Donna’s heart—and in many ways it still did. Now, though, as Bill took his last shallow breaths, she realized this distance had its advantages.
Swallowing the dregs of the coffee she’d spent the last four hours drinking, Donna told her. She just came right out with it.
Eloise listened, and when Donna was finished, she nodded. “I suspected as much.”
“You did?”
“The last few times we were all together he treated Paul like an absolute stranger.”
They were quiet for a moment, and Donna remembered last Christmas, when she screamed at Bill for being so cold to his son. She’d spent the holiday terrified that Paul was going to ask her if something was wrong, if he’d done something to upset his father, and she’d have no choice but to come clean. He didn’t, though, and Donna was once again thankful for how convincing denial could be.
“Please don’t say anything to Paul,” she asked Eloise. “Or Alice.”
Her daughter took her hand. “I’d never do that, Mom.”<
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November 22, 2012
It’d been a gradual scrubbing away of Bill, not a full-blown yard sale. That’s what she wants to tell Paul, but she knows it won’t matter. The process won’t interest him so much as the end result: his father has vanished. For the past thirty minutes she’s been following him through the house, enduring his lashings as he’s embarked on a full cataloging of all his father’s possessions that are now missing: golf clubs, clothes, a fly-fishing rod. In short: everything.
“Oh my God,” he says, burying his face in his hands, “this is fucked. This is so fucked.”
She looks to her daughter for some kind of support, but all Alice does is finish her glass of wine. Donna crosses to the sink, where two pounds of boiled potatoes steam in a colander. After fetching a pot and a carton of cream, she starts mashing them. Anything to distract herself, she thinks, anything to keep her from looking at Paul.
“You did this because you hated him,” he says. His ribs heave and expand with each breath.
She doesn’t say anything. Instead, she runs cool water over a bunch of carrots and watches it splash against the counter, making a mess. She wonders if her son can tell that her pulse has quickened, if he can hear it thumping against her temples. She wants, desperately, to tell him the truth. She wants to explain how, once the pain of Bill’s death had subsided, the only thing she could focus on was getting rid of him and the terrible lies he left in his wake. She wants to explain that her reason was him, was Paul; that after surviving her second disaster of a marriage, all that she had left was what actually mattered: her children. And she almost does—she almost tells him all this. After pummeling the mashed potatoes to a milky consistency, she almost lays everything bare, and saves herself the horror of falling on her sword. Her mouth opens, and she has it all there, stored in the base of her lungs. But then, suddenly, she stops. She doesn’t. Her own devastation has been enough for one lifetime, she figures; there’s only so much disappointment one family can be expected to take.
