“What a pretty necklace,” she remarked to the woman. “Coffee?”
The woman pressed her napkin into a stray crumb that decorated the tabletop. “Do you have tea?” she asked, staring mid-chest, where Chloe could Feel one chilled-to-erection nipple poking the first E in Wedler’s. Christ, it was Monday, forever, all over the world.
“Six kinds herbal, plus Lipton’s.”
“Lipton’s.”
“You take cream?”
“Is it fresh?”
“Well, we don’t have old Bessie out back, but it’s the real thing.”
The woman gave her husband a little slap on the arm. “Dear, if you can peel your eyes away from that screen you might want to order.”
He loosened his tie and gave the spandex ladies a farewell glance. His favorite form of exercise, Chloe figured. Guy could probably bench-press 180 with his eyelids, if it was female tonnage.
“Decaf, sweetie,” he said.
She thought she could size up appetites fairly well. “We’ve got homemade biscuits and gravy to just about break your heart,” she told him. “How about an order of those to tuck alongside a cheese omelet?”
For a moment he looked hopeful. The wife with the necklace didn’t have to say a word. “English muffin,” he muttered.
“Coming up.”
Rich caught her arm as she opened the refrigerator to get the cream.
“Today you be nice to my fucking customers,” he hissed.
Chloe sighed and shut the stainless-steel door. “And those that are celibate?”
He stumbled back to the kitchen, bawling Lita out for cutting the carrots at a Chinese angle. “You want everyone to expect the vegetables to be cut nice from now on? Just cut them regular!”
Chloe sighed and bit her lip. She told the old couple, “You have to excuse the cook. He’s cranky until about three o’clock. Let me get you something else. Fresh berries? We have some strawberries that were just delivered this morning.”
“No, thank you. Just the cream.”
The woman took a sniff of the pitcher before she poured.
“That’s right,” Chloe mumbled. “Always best to check for dead mice.”
“Young lady, we’ve just come from a funeral.”
“Sorry.” She served the elderly couple their snack, then stood behind the register staring out at the boulevard, watching the wash of color change as cars sped past. She thought of the dead mare again, her shoe-button eye staring up at nothing, not seeing the rotting rafters of the barn, the human faces trying to will her back, or the troublesome colt who had sent her south in the first place. By now, if Gabe had wrapped his legs, the colt might be up and running, thrilled with the freedom having legs offered, even such iffy legs as his. When his stomach reminded him something was missing, they’d plug him with formula, but when he needed the warmth of his mother’s flank, where would he go?
The necklace woman signaled for more hot water. Chloe nudged Lita. “I’ve already insulted them,” she said. “Your turn.”
Lita, short, mousy, closer to forty than she’d told Rich, was determined to please. “So sorry to hear about the funeral,” she said, fingering an amethyst crystal on a leather thong that hung down between her breasts. “Try to think of your loved one as taking a long nap. Can’t hurt, can it? I mean, nobody’s actually proved heaven exists, have they? When you get right down to it, a nap’s pretty darn close to heaven, isn’t it?”
Chloe watched Lita ring up their bill. “Good job with the carrots,” she told her. “Keep it up.”
Kit Wedler showed up just before three, when Lita had gone home with a headache and Chloe was wiping tables and filling up bottles of Cajun hot sauce from a plastic gallon jug. Kit was wearing a lavender pantsuit designed for a woman who had worked long and hard to top a hundred and fifty pounds, not a five-foot-three thirteen-year-old who regularly pored over the pages of Sassy magazine.
“Hey, Chloe, hate that shirt.”
“Thanks, I hate it, too. Why aren’t you in school?”
Kit ignored her question. “Seen my dad?”
“Out back arguing with the produce man. Trying to rook him out of his measly profit on the tomatoes. You’d better not be cutting school again.”
Kit helped herself to a large Coke. It wasn’t Diet. “I swear to God, I’m not cutting school. It’s ‘teacher preparation’ day.”
Chloe screwed the last lid down on the hot-sauce bottles. “Your dad might fall for that story, but not me.”
Kit added a hefty scoop of ice cream to her glass and topped it with six maraschino cherries. “Guy, you, like, don’t trust anybody, do you?”
Chloe wiped up a splash the Coke had left on the counter. “I trust Hannah.”
“Come on, Hannah’s a dog.”
“Don’t let her hear you talk like that. She thinks she’s a goddess.”
Kit sat down Indian-style on the wooden floor. “Honest, Chloe. They let us out. They’re supposed to, like, require all this extra time to plan lessons and shit. I guess that’s why they about run you down on their way out of the parking lot.” She waved hands in front of her face, miming cars with them. “Honda madness! It doesn’t matter. I hate school anyway. Geeky boys sticking their tongues down water fountains. I am sure.”
Chloe sat down on a counter stool. “School’s got pluses. It taught me where the apostrophe goes. How to divide. I can figure out why I bounce checks and recognize the possessive errors on billboards.”
“Whoopee.”
Hannah slunk in and butted her head up under Kit’s hand.
“Don’t give her any ice cream; dairy’s bad for dogs.”
“Jeez, I wasn’t.”
“And don’t let Rich see her in here, either. He’ll start in on the Health Department and her fleas.”
She gave the dog a fingerful of float. “No way. Look at her cool, thick fur! She’d like, make an extreme winter coat, if it ever snowed here. Hannah doesn’t have fleas, do you girl?”
“Only because they all die of thirst on the hike in.”
Kit stirred the float with a straw, then set it down on the floor. Hannah crept closer until Chloe cleared her throat, then the dog laid her head down and pretended to be sleeping. “Chloe, what color’s your pubic hair?”
Chloe set her order tablet on the counter. “This weird tan. It used to be blond, back in high school. I guess when you get old and decrepit, it darkens. Why?”
“Mine’s just this awful red,” she blurted, fighting tears.
“Red’s number one, kiddo. I’m jealous.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“Am not. Why, just this morning I took a poll of all the male customers. ‘Guys, what’s your preference?’ I asked. They all said the same thing—fire-engine red—what? You don’t believe me?”
“Duh,” Kit said.
Chloe leaned down and played with Hannah’s collar. “Do you get teased about it in gym?”
Kit nodded. The tears were spilling down her cheeks now.
“There’s more important things to waste tears on. What can I do to make you happy?”
“Nothing. I want jet black, like everyone else has.”
“I don’t have jet black.”
“You don’t have to take showers in P.E., either.”
“True. I suppose you could try dyeing it.”
“No kidding? Would you help me?”
Chloe undid her apron and tossed it into the trash can filled with soiled linen. She folded her arms across her breasts, more to support their weight than to hide them. Rich’s daughter. He’d gained full custody when her mother took off for India to console the exiled Bhagwan after the Oregon commune failed. Now Bhagwan was taking his long nap in the great universal oneness, and who knew where Mrs. Wedler was? Since that time, Kit had added poundage to her frame each month the same way some girls wear scores of clinking bracelets from the wrist to the elbow.
“I don’t see why not. We’ll do mine too. I hope the drugstore has a
stomping big selection. I think I want hot pink. My favorite color. And if there’s any left over, we’ll do Hannah up, give her a big old racing stripe, right down the back.”
Hannah lifted her head, studied their faces, hightailed it for the back door. Kit wiped her face on a napkin and looked up at Chloe. “I wish you were my mother.”
“Think it over, Kit. I’d embarrass you to death, whipping all those snake-tongued girls in your gym class.”
Kit tried to smile. “Yeah, probably. But they deserve it.”
CHAPTER
6
He might as well have been reading them model airplane instructions; he was dying up here along with Eurydice and her poison snake. Those students who weren’t drawing pictures in their notebooks or filing their nails were nearly asleep despite Orpheus’s lyre and his grief. Sometimes, no matter what you did, it just went like that. The teacher who took it to heart would end up jumping off a building, so Hank didn’t take it to heart. He stopped talking, waiting for them to notice the silence. A few of them stared up blankly; the note takers looked irritated at the break in established rhythm.
“My apologies,” Hank said. “I’m not fully with you today. Earlier this morning, I drew the lucky task of pallbearer at a funeral. First time for everything, so they say. It’s funny; I’ve been standing here for years discussing the myths that explore death and never felt frightened of my own mortality, but it’s different when you and a few other men are hoisting a casket on a one-way trip.”
Larry Kolanoski, the lone surfer who favored the back row, tossed his head back, whipping sunbleached hair from his red-rimmed eyes and said, “Yeah, it’s heavy, dude.”
Laughter, some groaning. The majority responded to any admission of human emotion on a teacher’s part as unthinkably absurd. Their disbelieving faces would rather be out living life, even on a cold and rainy January day when the surf was lousy, than sitting here listening to a middle-aged man ramble about his own mortality. A great deal of mileage would wear on those faces between now and forty, but there was no way to explain that to them. They wouldn’t believe it if it were engraved in stone. It had to surprise everyone, and surprise each of them differently.
“Actually, Larry, a casket’s surprisingly light, when you consider the weight of a man in his seventies who lived fully and died suddenly. That’s the eerie thing.”
“So, is class canceled?”
Hank dismissed it all—the blond formica desk chairs, the putty-colored walls, the stained blue carpeting school budgets were scheduled to replace next year after they decided which teaching contracts not to renew. He focused on Cora, an elderly woman who enrolled in his courses every semester. From her information sheet he’d learned that she was returning to school after a forty-year hiatus. When Hank was having a bad day, he often spoke only for Cora’s benefit, allowing the others around her to dim out. “Sorry, Larry. Departmental funding willing, we’ll be seeing each other for the next three and a half months.”
“Bummer.” The boy sighed and laid his head down on the desktop, where it would no doubt remain solidly planted for the next hour and a half. Who knew why he was here? He worked nights. His father bribed him to stay in school with a hefty allowance. Was there now a major in surfing?
“Okay,” Hank said. “Let’s see if we can jump forward from the river Styx to my funeral again. No river there at all, not even so much as a fountain, come to think of it. Let’s look at it in terms of modern myth. It might be fun to write out a few of our own.”
A collective groan rang out. Actual work? Hank ignored them.
“First we’ll set the scene. This man begins a day of his well deserved retirement in the ordinary manner. Thoughts of death aren’t even near his conscious mind. He’s more concerned about his golf score. Then it happens. He feels the stab of pain shoot down his left arm and in the brief span of consciousness left to him, he realizes he’s dying. What sorts of mythic encounters can you imagine? Anybody?”
His shier students grinned and gazed down at their notebooks. Don’t call on me, please. I only took this class because Andrea told me it was an easy A. What do I know about dying? Several of the males stared boldly back as if this was no game in which they intended to participate. He allowed the requisite thirty seconds, then pointed to Kathryn Price, the blond freshman from Texas. She might not have an answer, but she was gutsy and jumped right into any discussion. And listening to her cornbread-soft accent was not in the least unpleasant.
“Me? Oh, shoot, Mr. Oliver. How can I guess what an old man might think?”
“You have brothers, uncles, a father?”
She frowned. “Six brothers, unfortunately.”
“Go from there. Use your imagination.”
“Well, first off, I think he’d be pissed at all the things he didn’t do, like maybe climb a mountain, or clean his rifle, maybe kiss his wife that morning, or at least get to ride his horse one last time. Yeah, I think he’d be sorry for all the stuff he meant to do, but didn’t. And then I think he might be mad as hell.”
A dark-skinned hand shot up, didn’t wait for acknowledgment before speaking. Carlos, new this semester. Methodical papers that verged on the poetic. The kid needed to be at the university, not piddling around the junior college. “Sir, do you think the manner in which one dies makes a difference?”
“Give me a little more to go on, Carlos.”
“Well, I agree with Kathryn. Anger’s no bit-part player in life. The recent events in the Gulf—people dying in savage circumstances—do you think—”
William Strauss shook his wrist, braceleted with several thongs and what looked like spiked dog collars. “Did you, like, hear what they did to the people over there? Drilling holes in their kneecaps? Raping grandmothers? Isn’t that sick?”
Hank took a measured breath. “It certainly isn’t healthy. Will, all of us appreciate your interest in politics, but we’ve got a lot of ground to cover here. Can we stick to the subject?”
“But a heart attack’s so boring! Couldn’t he die having his skin ripped off by a vulture?”
Kathryn swiveled to face Will. “You really ought to see a therapist, William.”
“You’re all the therapy I need, baby.”
“Oh, grow a conscience!”
Hank suppressed a smile. Were all Texas women like that? Maybe he should fly down to Austin for spring break. “Let’s try to make every one happy here. We have an ordinary death, a man in his seventies. But it’s no ordinary event to him. We’ll try to address Carlos’s concerns, and to appease William, let’s imagine that possibly the heart pain feels like a vulture is ripping off his skin. We’ve established that he might feel regret and anger. Now let’s throw in an observer. His golf partner? No, too easy. What if we place an animal there? How about a coyote, wandering onto the golf course, looking for something to eat?”
“Yes!” William shot out. “Tired of eating housecats from the Big Canyon tract! Make him rabid!”
Hank could see William Strauss approaching orgasm from the potential horror of the situation. Perhaps he would have been better off sticking to poor Orpheus—guileless musician whose only mistake had been looking back, not trusting that the woman he loved would follow—letting the students sleepily finish out the hour. But he forged ahead. “No to the housecats this time, Will. You might consider the idea that death is not so jarring in the animal world. On a daily basis, most creatures see it, certainly nondomesticated creatures. They’re almost instantly recycled, whereas man is not directly returned to the earth. Animals in the modern world exist in several categories: as pets, pests, curiosities, and to feed man. Vultures, and we’re talking the garden-variety type, eat the flesh of dead animals. When the bones are left, smaller animals go after those for the calcium. Eventually the whole mess filters down into the soil and grows grasses, berries, what have you, to feed other animals. And the whole business starts over again.”
“Gross,” Kathryn sang out. “I won’t need my lunch money today
except for a pack of Rolaids.”
“But why is it unsettling to humans, Kathryn? Are we so insulated from death that we simply ignore it?”
She looked away for a moment, and her voice softened. “One summer I saw a girl drown in a Dallas swimming pool. Just dove in smiling and didn’t come up till a lifeguard dragged her. She was blue, with purple lips and her arms and legs all limp. I was maybe six years old at the time.”
“But you never forgot it. Did you go to her funeral?”
“No, but half the town did. Mama said I was too young.”
“That’s my point. So we come full circle to my funeral. When man, useless, really, save for his consuming, exits this world, does there have to be a send-off ceremony to salve the anxiety the living feel? Is that the function of a funeral, much like the one I attended? Maybe its roots are ancient appeasement for this break in the order. In ritual, such as my walking along with the other men lifting a part of the casket, the participants willingly suspend reality to ensure release of the soul. In reality, all I did was lend a few muscles to move a box from one place to another—the church to the hearse—but the myth I participated in involves brotherhood, a willing suspension of disbelief, a certitude that maybe it required my living hand to help his body pass from one world to the next, that unseen world we all expect as a reward for good behavior. The survivors see the funeral as integral in the final journey of the dead, cyclical, respectful.” Most faces were on him now, listening. “But maybe most of us are feeling like Kathryn. Deep down, we’re scared. I wonder if any of you could participate in such a ritual and not be forced to confront your own mortality?”
Hank & Chloe Page 5
