Funerals for Horses (retail)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  She came to our house to recover, but apparently recovery was not in her plans. She refused wheelchair, walker, crutches. She refused to sit up again. She refused even to lift her huge, uncooperative body onto her own bedpan, forcing my mother to lift her, to feed her, to administer her pills, to listen to her kvetching, to jump out of sleep to calm her unreasonable fears.

  This my mother would do for the kin of a man who abandoned her. Much as I loathed Grandma Ginsberg, I used to openly hope for her longevity, assuming that my mother would die without the constant, unyielding torment.

  Grandma Ginsberg lived in a dank, smelly back bedroom which children avoided as if by precognition, even neighbor children who didn’t know her. Later, after the sports sections began stacking up, we never invited neighbor children anyway.

  When my father left, my mother began to pull the sports section out of the evening paper before bundling the leftovers for the Boy Scout paper drive. Nobody dared ask why until almost two years later, when the papers had been assigned their own closet, then spilled beyond it.

  Simon had the guts, not me. Brave, honest Simon, twelve years old to my six, asked if he could throw them away.

  “Certainly not,” she said. “Your father will be home any day now, and the first thing he’ll want is dinner and his sports section.”

  She swirled out of the room as if in a hurry, leaving me alone with my brother Simon, who twisted a finger around near his head as a comment on her mental acuity. I was shocked and impressed. How can a child admit a parent is unstable? To me it seemed equivalent to suggesting that the ground won’t hold us up, or gravity won’t stick us down to it. But Simon worked off a different set of laws. Simon stepped on cracks. Simon was never afraid to see.

  I often thought it was Simon, not me, who should have been born with the caul.

  In these early years, when I still assumed god placed us somewhere on his long agenda, I wondered if he had simply forgotten it when Simon was born, then sent it along with me as an afterthought, thinking it would at least arrive into the right family. Most say god never makes mistakes, but I was a reasonable child, able to accept that even as his powers outnumber ours, so must his list of responsibilities and details grow geometrically beyond our scope. I would cut him some slack. But to assume the role of chosen one, in a family with my brother Simon—no, that I could never do.

  Simon was the hero. Not just my hero. The hero, period. He couldn’t have held his job any more decisively if he’d been born with the word tattooed on his forehead.

  Now my sister DeeDee, she was the actress.

  DeeDee’s life fell apart the day Grandma Ginsberg called her a whore and a thief.

  Mind you, this was nothing special.

  Pushing into the depths of that back bedroom, you could be her loving grandchild, a wild Indian headhunter, or her whoring bastard ex-husband. Or perhaps the day would yield some new hallucination. Simon always smiled and took it philosophically. I had long since stopped going in.

  DeeDee stormed into the kitchen, where Simon and I sat at the table brushing sand paintings with salt we’d emptied from the shaker, her face red and hot with indignation, tears sliding through her toughest guard.

  Simon grabbed her in a bear hug, and motioned me to come quickly, and we sandwiched her between us until the hitching of her sobs replaced trembling rage. I felt the trembling, the hitch, and wondered why I couldn’t feel pain and rage, as I appeared to be a sentient human, with nerve endings and everything.

  DeeDee,” he said, “you know she always does this. Remember when she called me goyim and slammed my hand in the door? That was way back when she was herself.”

  “I just can’t stand it,” DeeDee said, barely audible. “One grand-mother who hates me, fine—but not two for two.”

  He took her by the hand and we led her into my mother’s room, where Mom lay half-sleeping, though it was after four. Simon explained that Grandma Ginsberg had called DeeDee a whore and a thief. He knew and I knew that she did these things regularly, but for DeeDee’s sake, I assumed, he filed an official report.

  Our mother raised her head.

  “Simon, did you get ground beef for dinner? Run to the store right now, dear.”

  “Mom,” he repeated, “DeeDee is very upset.”

  “Make him grind it right in front of you. Don’t get what’s already ground. God only knows what they put into that.”

  Blood rose into DeeDee’s face again. “You don’t listen, you crazy old lady,” she screamed too close to my left eardrum.

  “And hurry back from the store, dear—I’ll get up and start dinner.”

  But she didn’t move.

  As Simon sprinted to the market clutching the dollar bill he had pulled from the grocery fund, DeeDee opened each of the kitchen cabinets, stood on a step stool, and hooked her arm behind every stack of dishes and glasses, pulling them out into gravity, and their appointment with the linoleum. When our mother appeared to start dinner, her slippered feet skidded around in the debris. I closed my eyes and pictured a beach scattered with a thousand clam shells, or a wind chime tinkling on the porch.

  But a minute later, as she stood staring into the empty cabinets, the shards crunching under her weight, I imagined the sound my shattering teeth might make if I ever clenched them as hard as I really wanted.

  After a few minutes’ surveillance, and after Simon had returned, puffing from exertion, she turned back to him and asked if he’d remembered paper plates.

  DeeDee would have screamed if in Simon’s place. I would have groused that she’d requested no such thing. Simon simply pulled another dollar from the fund and took off running as my mother dropped the ground beef into an overheated pan with a startling sizzle.

  No one thought about paper cups, and we had to take occasional trips from the table to the sink, to drink water from the faucet. We walked carefully to avoid slipping in the shifting sea of glass and china fragments.

  Three days later I came home from school to find a box full of the stuff at the curb. I felt a great relief, knowing that my mother had noticed, even acknowledged, a situation requiring attention. The pleasure faded as my brother Simon pushed through the kitchen door with the second box. As I hung up my coat, he put the broom and dustpan away without comment.

  “Simon, we don’t have two grandmothers, do we?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Everybody has two grandmothers.”

  I knew there had been such a thing as a Grandma Sterling, but owing to the fact that I’d never seen her, I pictured her dead.

  I asked why Grandma Sterling was never around, though it seemed like asking for trouble. If Grandma Ginsberg went away, I’d be smart enough not to inquire after her.

  “Her choice,” he said with a shrug, and then he whispered, “I don’t think she likes us.”

  And what was my role in all of this? I had none. They’d all been taken. My job was not to exist at all. Though too much alive to play it to perfection, I feel I performed a fairly adept imitation.

  EDGE OF THE EARTH

  On the drive to Sacramento, I question myself in an endless, hamster-wheel pattern as to whether Sarah thinks of herself as my brother’s widow. Of course, I will not ask. Because if she does, I could no longer be kind to Sarah, and above all I need to be kind.

  I arrive at the house late, too late, really. I can see I’ve awakened her. Her hair, fine and blond like his, flies in many directions, most leading across her face. Her fair skin seems lined and dough-like, the way his did upon waking. With my dark, Semitic looks, I’m sure an outsider would guess me as the wife, her as the sister. I suppose I’d switch with her if the world would allow.

  She’s glad to see me.

  “Ella,” she says. “Baby.”

  She’s never called me baby before, but she’s sleepy, a sort of inexpensive truth serum. And we are bound by a common love, a stronger bond now, as it extends to a common loss.

  She throws her arms around me and I leech her warmth. It’
s not fair, really. It’s a trick I learned from Grandma Ginsberg, to draw strength from an embrace without returning any. But I know Sarah will be warm in her house while I’m away, walking off the edge of a flat earth. I must assume she won’t begrudge me.

  She pulls me inside, where I tell her I want a complete lesson on where Simon’s clothes were found.

  Of course, I could have gotten that much by phone, but I need so much more. I need a piece of her to take along.

  Then, I say, I will take a good night’s sleep and proceed. But I do not take a good night’s sleep.

  I lie awake all night, on Simon’s side of the bed, because there is only the one bedroom, thinking that I am no substitute for him, and have no right to be here. The moon is nearly full, and a streak of it slides through his bedroom window, falling across the picture. Across Simon’s soft, full cheeks, the fold of extra flesh under his chin, his sandy blond hair, which falls onto his forehead. He is a Tom Sawyer of a businessman. His mustache curls around at the corners of his smile. It is a twelve-year-old’s smile. It always was. When he was seven, when he was forty.

  The only thing my family ever did right was to breed that smile.

  The moon shows it all.

  Thank god the moon is on my side. I’ll need a piece of that, a piece of Sarah, all of myself and all of Simon. Even then, this may be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

  In the morning I am running on my generator.

  Unlike some people, I function beautifully on no sleep, but a sort of auxiliary power kicks in, different from the natural one. It feels sharp-edged and cold. It tends to make people avoid me, even those who would be inclined to spend time around me to begin with.

  Sarah does not avoid me.

  She makes me a pot of coffee and a bacon omelet, and cries as she watches me eat.

  She holds me at the door, as if she’s on to me and knows what I need. She slips me more warm strength than I would think she could spare.

  I walk across the street to my old pickup, like a hike across flat terrain to the edge of the earth.

  THEN:

  If the drums had worked, I might still have a sister. The drums did not work. It was a piece of clever thinking on DeeDee’s part, though. I will grant her that. By now, with Simon fifteen, DeeDee eleven, me nine, the age I accepted god’s noninvolvement policy, my mother responded to almost nothing. Only one thing could rouse her out of bed: Grandma Ginsberg’s heated complaints. Who would have thought such a thing could have a purpose?

  DeeDee traded her bike for a set of drums, and, as a courtesy to the family, played them only in the garage. This broken-down structure, far too stacked and littered with yellowing sports sections to house the car, faced out onto the back yard, six feet from Grandma Ginsberg’s window.

  DeeDee never took lessons on the drums; she just pounded. Grandma Ginsberg screamed until her old throat faltered and her voice cracked into a hoarse whisper.

  My mother did not get up.

  Finally I asked Simon, who knew everything, why my mother would respond to nonsense from the old lady while ignoring a real problem.

  “But that’s just it,” he said. “Don’t you see?”

  I wasn’t sure I did, but I hated to appear ignorant in front of my brother.

  In a few months the drums stood silent in the corner of the garage, near the spot where DeeDee took to setting fires. They were only little fires at first, but I sensed a personal game of chicken involved, as if she challenged herself to set a blaze which would tease the borderline of control.

  When the big one came, Simon said it just got away from her by mistake. I’m sure he knew better, but he liked to think the best about people if they met him halfway.

  The big one came at night, with DeeDee running through our room to Simon’s room, yelling fire at the top of her lungs, as though this was news, her face blackened with smoke.

  As my bare feet hit the cold boards of the bedroom floor, the room lit up like a night thunderstorm, only with lightning that stayed. I ran to the window to watch the flames engulf the garage roof. I heard Grandma Ginsberg come apart. DeeDee climbed under my bed as Simon grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “Call the fire department,” he said.

  I wished at that moment that I was Simon. Then I wouldn’t have to ask a stupid question.

  “Uh. What’s their number again?”

  “Just dial the operator. Tell her you need the fire department.”

  His blue eyes bored into me, full of fear, but a fear that wouldn’t slow him down or trip him up.

  As I told the fire department our address, I watched the trees rain, and the windows streak and flow with water. I ran outside to find Simon hosing down the roof.

  Then it all happened at once, all the light, all the sound. The sirens blended with the popping wood, the cracking roof supports. The red flashing lights blended with the eerie flicker of the engulfed structure. Fire hoses overpowered Simon’s little garden hose.

  The neighborhood watched in robes and bare feet.

  A fireman cornered my brother Simon. “Where are your parents, son?”

  “My father’s gone,” I heard him say.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  Simon only shrugged in that spooky glow. “I dunno. Sleeping, I guess.”

  That’s when it occurred to me that Grandma Ginsberg had fallen silent.

  My mother was carried out of the house, against her will by the look of it. Simon informed the chief that DeeDee could be found under a bed.

  The fire was quickly contained, though with no garage left to speak of; except for the scorched roof, the house sustained no real damage.

  Grandma Ginsberg was carried out on a stretcher, her face covered with a sheet, already dead, I would learn later, of a heart attack.

  I knew I would have my work cut out for me, wondering whether I needed to feel bad or not.

  My mother stumbled back into the house on the all-clear signal, and fell asleep again, as Simon explained to the remaining firefighters that Grandma Ginsberg might have to be handled like a person with no relatives. Only Simon could explain a thing like that and cause grown men to nod their understanding.

  Simon called Uncle Manny in the morning, and next thing we knew, our father was home, making all the arrangements.

  Our mother did not attend the funeral. I felt sure her days were numbered now, or simply negated, so that even if they did drag on, they would go for nothing.

  Our father asked Simon to say a few words to the bereaved.

  “Just stand right up there, son, and say a few things you remember about your grandmother.”

  Simon did a lovely job, I thought.

  He told the story of Grandma Ginsberg chasing DeeDee and him around the apartment, back in her mobile days, shaking her finger at them, saying “You dasn’t do that” repeatedly over their laughter. He never explained their transgression, only the way they laughed at her later for her use of the word “dasn’t,” a word they could swear didn’t exist in the English language.

  Then he told the story of the slamming door. The day he saw baby DeeDee go into Grandma Ginsberg’s bedroom and climb on the bed, and how he figured he could do it if she could. But then, when he tried, she called him goyim and held his hand in the bedroom door and slammed it on his hand to teach him better than to try such a thing again.

  And then later he knew why, he explained, because he overheard her talking to our father, complaining that the Simon boy looked just like his shiksa wife.

  As he explained this last little bit, Simon’s voice faded as our father ushered him off the podium, away from the microphone.

  Poor Simon. Poor brave, honest Simon. Everybody acted like he had a disease. He meant no harm, of course. Nobody had warned him that he was supposed to act.

  DeeDee brought Andy, her stuffed horse, to the funeral, and to the shiva. She grabbed little handfuls of matzo strips or a piece of gefilte fish from the buffet, then hid under the coffee table, pretending to
feed Andy.

  If anyone had noticed, they might have found it odd behavior for a girl of eleven, but we were all three mercifully invisible, even our voices drowned in the moans and sobs.

  I sat on the rug beside the coffee table, as though she’d let me be close to her. I reached out to pet Andy, but she slapped my hand away.

  He was a small horse, six or seven inches long, stiff legs inside his blue and green cover to stand up by himself. Andy had a windup key in his belly, which my sister now cranked obsessively, causing him to roll his head around on a geared neck and play “Brahms’ Lullaby.”

  Thinking I was being kind, I told DeeDee that when she grew up, she might be able to own a real horse.

  She flew out from under the table at me, like ghosts from a Halloween house, threw me and pinned me and seized my throat in her adrenaline-powered grasp.

  “Don’t ever say Andy isn’t a real horse. Ever. Promise.”

  I would have, if I could, if she had let go of my throat, or if Uncle Manny hadn’t disrupted the moment by pulling her off to the other side of the room.

  He sat with DeeDee on his lap, one huge arm around her waist, restraining her as she wailed and thrashed. He must have thought she was on her way back to attack me, but I knew better. I retrieved Andy from under the coffee table, and carried him, as reverently as I knew she would, back to his rightful owner. She sat still then.

  It was the best apology I could make, because words would not have come close.

  DeeDee didn’t speak to me for a week. But she didn’t speak to anyone else either, so I didn’t take it too hard. Besides, she ended her silence in my presence, in our room just before sleep.

  “If anything happens to me,” she whispered, “I want you and Simon to give Andy a proper burial. With a funeral service and everything.”

  I wondered if we were to sit shiva for Andy, but I wasn’t sure what I could say to her and what I couldn’t.