by Alix Ohlin
“I can’t have gluten,” Jake said from inside the plastic house. “If I do I get diarrhea.”
“Sorry to hear that,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Jake said. “They make pizza and spaghetti without gluten in it so I can still have them whenever I want.” Talk of gluten seemed to lighten his mood.
“Maybe some of the snacks at the funeral will be gluten-free,” I said.
The Fox looked even madder. She plopped herself on a bench and kicked off her shoes, scowling. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Sonia. That was always your problem.”
First of all in no way was that always my problem, and second of all—oh, whatever. “I said maybe,” I pointed out. I sat down next to her on the bench, entirely because I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of having it all to herself. She sighed irritably and I sighed back. Our fights were always like this—circular, subtextual, impossible to resolve, and I was forever returning to her to clear up some misunderstanding that only deepened the more we talked, until it was the misunderstanding itself that seemed to bind us together.
From where we sat on the bench we could see only the very tip of Jake’s brown head. A chilly but not unpleasant wind ruffled his hair. I could smell the Fox’s perfume, a leafy, citrusy smell which seemed the same as when I knew her years ago, although I didn’t remember her ever owning perfume, so maybe it was her shampoo? I couldn’t remember what shampoo she’d used, and this made me sad, to think that I lived with her for all those months, a time that was fraught and turbulent yet crucial to my history—I would never have had the good sense to fall in love with a woman like Cat, I believe, had I not learned the hard way to avoid women like the Fox—and now so many details of it were lost and would never be found again. In this nostalgic mood I moved closer to her and as if she were feeling the same way she leaned her head against my shoulder and I put my arm around her and then she was crying, and it might have been a sweet moment, I guess, had Jake not said, “Guys? I peed in my pants.”
* * *
—
Except for that game of FMK Cat never talked about her patients. With the same exactitude that governed her scheduling she refused to bring her work home. I only ever learned that someone had died when she told me the date of the funeral; then I’d think back in my head about the previous week and wonder which day it had happened and if Cat had seemed different that day, but she never did. She was the same every day. Maybe it sounds cold, but it isn’t. When I introduced Cat to my friends, I saw how they reacted to her profession. They said things like “I could never do what you do” or “That’s so intense” and then they recoiled from her like dying was a virus she might transmit to them. After a while I stopped saying “hospice” when I told people what she did for a living, and eventually I stopped talking about what she did at all.
The first funeral we went to was Maureen Stella’s. She was in her forties, divorced, cervical cancer. Cat told me when to be ready, what to wear. She was her usual controlled self until just before we left the condo, when she gripped my arm, hard, and said she didn’t want to go. “I hate this,” she said.
“You don’t have to go,” I told her. I mean, hadn’t she done enough? Her whole job was doing the things that other people couldn’t or wouldn’t do.
“That’s not what you’re supposed to say. You’re supposed to make me go.”
“But why?”
“Because I was invited.”
“Okay, but—”
“Because I was invited.”
“Okay.”
Maureen Stella, it turned out, had no partner, no children, no surviving parents or family. But her funeral was packed to capacity. She’d befriended the waitstaff at all her favorite restaurants. She’d kept in touch with her best friend from kindergarten, had driven her elderly neighbor to physical therapy appointments. She’d sent flowers to people just because. Also, she had been really good at dying. By which I mean: she’d told people what they meant to her; she’d been honest about her suffering; she’d held on to whatever small joys she could. She sounded amazing. Though I’d never met her I couldn’t stop crying throughout the service, while Cat, densely medicated, sat stone-faced and composed. I thought this was what she wanted me to see: that the world was a worse place with the loss of each and every person, and that the moment of this loss deserves its due. That to run away from death was to refuse value to life. As it turned out, I was wrong. After the service we went to a sports bar—Cat likes sports, she isn’t athletic but scorekeeping appeals to her—and drank a pitcher of beer and she asked me politely never to cry at a funeral again. She didn’t want me to grieve. She wanted me to hold her hand tightly and dig my fingernails into her palm so deep it hurt. She wanted me to stand still and rigid and as silent as possible. She wanted me to wear the same thing every time, to drive the car, to take her there and back. She was asking me, I finally understood, to be her container, her calendar, the system of measurements that holds the moment in check. I agreed, and I kept my promise, until the day I saw the Fox.
* * *
—
The Fox was crouched next to the playhouse, peering through the tiny windows, trying to get Jake to hand her his wet pants. Crying had messed her eye makeup so that she looked a bit ruined, in a sexy way, and I’m sorry to say I could feel my old attraction to her reviving from its dormancy. I felt guilty and ashamed, which only had the effect of magnifying the attraction further.
“I can’t get them off,” Jake said. “They’re sticking to me.”
“Just peel them.”
“What do you mean, peel them?”
“You know, start from the top and work them down.”
“That’s not peeling, that’s pushing.”
“Okay,” the Fox said. “Then push.”
“Doesn’t he need to take his shoes off first?” I said. The Fox looked at me, her mouth a straight line of aggravation. I decided not to make my next point, which was that taking a pants-less kid back to a funeral was perhaps as great an offense as a pee-stained one.
From inside the playhouse, Jake burst into loud, theatrical sobs. “I don’t want to take my shoes off!” he cried. “My feet need to be protected.”
Parenthood seemed like a drag. “What’s with you, anyway?” I asked him.
“I can’t control my feelings,” he said.
I mean, I bought it, as an explanation. I’ve been there myself. “What about your mom, though, and the rest of your family? Why are you making today all about you?”
“For God’s sake, Sonia,” the Fox said. “He’s six years old.”
“Plucky six-year-olds in movies are always doing cute stuff and saving the day. Have you ever saved the day?”
Through the window, he looked at me with interest. I’m not suggesting I’m any kind of child whisperer, only that the novelty of the conversation was making an impression.
“Saved the day how?”
“I don’t know. By rescuing a stray dog. By booby-trapping a house when it’s being burglarized. By not being an asshole on the day of a funeral.”
“Whose house is being burglarized? Where?”
“No one’s house is being burglarized,” the Fox said. “And please don’t use bad words.”
“I bet Jake hears bad words at school all the time.”
“Yeah,” he said resignedly. “I do.”
“Which ones?” I asked. “Out of curiosity.”
“Poop. Fart. Stupid. One time Raffi said bitch.”
“You go to school with some potty-mouthed kids.”
“Grandpa said it’s because media is ruining our minds.”
“Probably true,” I said. As we talked I’d noted that the playhouse, while bolted to the ground, was snapped together at the top and sides without screws—designed for simple assembly without tools. What can be simply assembled c
an be simply disassembled, and I’d once, while on tour, taken apart an entire drum kit in seconds under the barked orders of a German customs official who was convinced we were smuggling drugs inside our snares.
“Watch out,” I said to the kid, and braced my knees; then I wrenched one side of the roof from the wall, and then detached one wall from its neighbor, so that the kid was exposed, mouth agape, inside his yawning shelter, as if after a tornado. The plastic had been loosened and whitened by the weather and the walls only came up to my waist, but I still felt like a superhero. It’s so fun to destroy things; no wonder people do it so much. Fortunately I didn’t expect the Fox to be impressed, because she wasn’t. She said, “What the hell are you doing? Jakie, are you all right?” without addressing me at all. It was important to her to see threat in any given situation, I remembered that, so that she could preserve her sense of victimhood. She pulled her kid to his feet and embraced him.
“Well, I’m going back to the funeral home,” I said. “I’m going to hug my girlfriend and find the brownies and whatever other snacks they have, gluten-filled or gluten-free. I’ll see you guys around.”
“See you,” Jake said.
I was halfway down the block when I heard the combined skip-shuffle of high heels and kid sneakers, the two of them following me, Jake with his hands in his wet pants, the Fox with a frown on her face, as if I hadn’t just saved her ass.
* * *
—
The service was drawing to a close. Cat stood rigid, her hands clasped in front of her crotch, her legs partly spread, like a bodyguard. When she saw me she looked neither relieved nor angry. She looked as if I meant nothing to her at all. I knew better than to run over and start with apologies. I took my place beside her without saying anything. “In My Life” by the Beatles was playing, and people stood up, blowing noses, smiling weakly.
A middle-aged man made his way over to Cat, extending his hand. “Good of you to be here,” he said. “Recognize you from the place. I bet you don’t do this for everybody.”
Cat smiled thinly, said nothing. When her anxiety peaks she has trouble even talking, but the guy didn’t seem to notice. “I’m Tony,” he said to me. “He was my uncle. Great guy.”
I knew his type, the glad-hander, the strong handshaker, the guy who acts like being in the room with death is not a big deal. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
“Well, thanks, but it wasn’t exactly a life cut short. A life cut long, if you will. The way we’d all like it to go.”
“Right,” I said. I was thinking that there was no way anyone wanted to go, that no matter the terms and circumstances, each of us is ripped with violence from the fabric of the living. That’s why Cat is so anxious at funerals. She can make it as easy as possible for a person, but a service brings out all the calculus that extends beyond the body, everything that refuses her control.
“How’d you get into the death biz anyway?” Tony asked Cat. “Sorry if that sounds bad, death biz. I’m an insurance adjuster myself, so I face disaster ratios all day long. You get a certain skin.”
Cat said nothing.
It was my job in that moment to ferry her away. I was distracted, though, because the Fox brushed past me, along with Jakie and the wafting acridity of his pee-smelling pants, and she squeezed my arm and mouthed “Thanks,” and Jake whispered very loudly, “They do have gluten-free snacks!” which made me laugh. And then Tony said, “Jenny! You look a right mess,” and the Fox said nonchalantly, “Fuck off, Tony,” and I laughed again. Cat dropped her hand from mine.
I picked it up again; I guided her to the door and out to the car. We went to the sports bar and split a pitcher. We watched a team in grey defeat a team in blue. Cat said nothing. I said nothing. We went home and found Murray had eaten part of a couch cushion while we were gone and was languishing in a corner. I took him to the emergency animal hospital and spent $500 to have his stomach pumped. Past midnight I came home and curled up next to Cat and fitted myself to her. We lay in bed together and I didn’t ask for her forgiveness and she didn’t offer it. We slept soundly, stonily, like our lives depended on it. Like we were in the room with death.
The Brooks Brothers Guru
John Lorimer wants to be friends on Facebook.
Amanda isn’t sure whether to accept. It’s a long night like any other, her bedroom blue-lit by devices, laptop and phone and iPad scattered on the comforter, earbuds nestled as she listens to Folk and Singer-Songwriters on Spotify; this is how she goes to sleep. She has three or four windows open on the computer; she’s watching a movie and reading reviews of it at the same time.
They have zero mutual friends.
In his profile picture, John stands, left knee bent, hands on hips, on a rock rising jaggedly from the ocean like a broken tooth. His short haircut looks military, his posture commendably rigid. He smiles like he’s never been happier. Amanda’s own picture shows a cartoon cat with its back rounded, fur up. She doesn’t like to give too much away. In John’s square jaw and dark brown hair she can barely make out traces of the gawky cousin she last saw—when, exactly? It would have been that summer in Virginia, when they were sixteen, both of their mothers sucking down gin and tonics as if alcohol were oxygen—years ago. Then John’s mother died, then hers, sisters so close they succumbed to the same disease within a year. The funerals were blurred and washy to her; when she tries to remember them, she can summon only feverish sweat and a churn in her stomach, no visuals at all.
Now she spends summer vacations with her father’s family in Delaware, those cheerful extended relatives with healthy genetic history and aged grandmothers and aunts, a family where nobody knows what BRCA stands for, where nobody has been getting yearly mammograms since they were twenty.
She doesn’t think they look alike. She confirms his request.
* * *
—
In eastern Pennsylvania, spring barely registers. Winter hangs on for weeks, overcast and determined, until one day you wake up sweating and sneezing, all the flowers in bloom. Amanda lives in the house where her mother grew up, which her father believes is a sign of some great disturbance in her psyche. He thinks it’s weird that she telecommutes to the design firm instead of working at the open-plan office in Philly, around other people her age. Amanda may be disturbed—she quite often feels disturbed—but the house is neither the symptom nor the source. She loves the place, and always has. It sits just outside Bethlehem, in an area that used to be organized into small farms but is gradually being developed into subdivisions. Though her mother found the transformation tragic—she was nostalgic for the rural existence from which she herself escaped as soon as possible—Amanda doesn’t mind it. There’s a feeling of nervy anticipation to the neighborhood, like being the first person at a cocktail party, waiting to see who’s going to show up. She likes being in on the ground floor. She’s only thirty, and already she’s seen the tail end of too many things. Soon there will be major roads here, and kids and schools and malls. For now, though, you can still see for miles over cornfields, and the night dark is bitten by thick strong stars. Inside the house, the flowered wallpaper peels back from the walls, the paint on the moldings is chipping, the appliances are mottled and yellow. But she wouldn’t, doesn’t, change any of it. The house has everything she needs.
* * *
—
John Lorimer turns out to be one of those Facebook friends who lack restraint. He plays a lot of games. He sends relentless invitations. He requests her birthday, her zodiac sign, her signature on social justice causes. They never contact each other directly. She considers unfriending him, but then the requests stop, and without the daily reminders she forgets he exists.
She spends the summer working on the house. She gets an electrician in to bring the wiring up to code, and has the outside repainted, and she feels diligent and adult. “How are you going to meet someone living all the wa
y out there?” her father sometimes nags her. “You’re hiding yourself away.” He keeps mentioning Emily, a cousin on his side, who’s getting married in December. Amanda tells him she isn’t hiding; she’s feathering a nest. When she mentions this phrase to him over Skype, he rolls his eyes.
In late August, John sends a message to all his Facebook friends, fifty-eight people. Amanda reads it on her phone, while running a bath.
Dear cherished friends.
Sorry for the mass email, but this seemed like the easiest way to let everybody I care about know about some important things that are happening in my life. As some of you are aware, I’ve spent the past six months studying with Jason Wilson, one of the great thinkers of our time. My education has opened my eyes to a deeper, more rigorous and profound way of seeing the world, and together we have decided that I’m ready to progress to the next level. So starting tomorrow I’ll be living on the Landau in upstate New York and pursuing my education full-time. This feels like a dream come true for me. I won’t be on Facebook or email for an indefinite period of time. No phone either. I’m very excited about this next phase of my life and I look forward to telling you all about it, my dear friends, whenever I see you next. Be well.
John
On Skype, Amanda tells her father about this message and its strange vague rhetoric, thinking he’ll find it an amusing anecdote. Jason Wilson, one of the great thinkers of our time? (She googled him and found nothing.) But as has happened so often over the past decade, she and her father are out of sync. Instead of being entertained, her father coughs once, a dry husk of sound, then lapses into silence.
“What?” she says.
“Your mother always worried about it. He was such a quiet kid. Never had a lot of friends. Your aunt was kind of like that, too.”
Amanda swallows the urge that always falls over her at moments like this, which is to say, hungrily: But what about Mom, what was she like, let’s talk about her, let’s beckon her into the room. Hoping that there might be some shred of information she hasn’t yet heard, some fresh drop from the well. Her father doesn’t approve of this. He thinks grief can be put to rest, tucked into bed at night like a child.
