I stood in line calculating how I was going to pay the formal respects. It would have been far preferable to be downstairs in the church basement cutting the cake in preparation for the “lunch,” or standing guard over the formidable coffee urn. I had offered, that is, Howard had offered for me. He had dialed and redialed numerous times until he finally got through to the Collins’s house. Theresa had told him that there were plenty of people to cover the bases.
“To cover the bases?” I had said, and Howard, because Nellie was standing in the doorway, did not reply. He rolled his eyes up and blinked, and then he left the room.
There was nothing more to say to Lizzy’s relatives. Theresa and Dan’s life would be forever changed. I couldn’t do effective CPR, hadn’t been organized enough to know where I put my swimming suit, couldn’t take care, was a heathen who barely knew how to pray. “I’m sorry,” wouldn’t really suffice.
My damp shirt was sticking to my stomach, and my wrists still smelled of the new Calvin Klein perfume, “Escape,” that I had found at Hutchin’s in the magazine. Howard’s mother had ironed the flowered skirt, and I had shaved my underarms as well as my legs with great care, with the fear that one unsightly black nub would be taken as a sign of disrespect. I was tall and fought, without much success, the habit of slouching. In line I stood erect. I reached up and pulled my hair out of its rubber band and smoothed it through the circle of my fingers, and refastened the band. It was then that I saw Mrs. Mackessy, several yards behind us. I had seen her at the hospital, in the waiting room. I had
waited in the lounge for three days, doing nothing. Waiting. It seemed that from now on everywhere I went there were going to be surprising people who would remind me of unpleasant things.
In the line at church she was respectable, as always. She was wearing a full white skirt and a pink shell, and her hair was held back by a gold banana clip. She was blowing air up into her face, her bottom lip pushed out like a pout.
“Look alive,” Howard whispered, prodding me.
I nodded. Right. Look alive. He had never used that expression before. I didn’t like Mrs. Mackessy, and her boy lurking behind her skirt; I didn’t like them being in line and on top of it she was acting as if the service was an obligation, an inconvenience. They didn’t belong—they weren’t really friends. I knew that Mrs. Mackessy and her husband had gone to Theresa for marriage counseling. I remember thinking that they weren’t our kind, that they were the sort who would take their welfare checks and go bet on dogs down at the racetrack.
“Alice, move along,” Howard said, with the exacting tone of a school master. I walked the three yards to his side. I tried again to think what I was going to do when I got to the receiving line. Should I clasp each relative’s hand, or kiss a cheek and pass wordlessly on? What about Theresa’s older brother, the one who looked like a thug? He might be waiting for me with a knife up his sleeve.
What do I do? I asked my dusty feet. If Howard knew how I felt he would guide me through the line. I’d rest my weary head on his shoulder and weep quietly, inconsolably, and he’d whisper to me, all the way through. I hoped I would cry the right amount. I guessed I should hug Dan whether or not he welcomed it. He would feel me quivering and perhaps understand my fear. What to say? What to say? I hated that Howard had told me to be quiet. In church I would try my best to cry enough to make an impression, but not so much that I couldn’t stop. Because the service was not much more than a show, like a wedding, a clean and public accounting of the horror and mess that had gone before.
I took a deep breath and licked my lips as I rounded the bend into the vestibule. The casket was before us, the white casket with gold trim around the edges, as if it had come with a little girl’s vanity and canopy bed set. It was the size of the box Emma’s coaster wagon had come in. A
person couldn’t take it in at once but had to adjust, by degrees, to what amounted to a terrible glare. Lizzy had been laid inside, propped up by the white satin pillows. Her dress had puffed pink sleeves with bows on the seams and a yoke with bows across the chest, and a pinafore with lace stripes sewn to the eyelet. They had shut the lower half of the casket. She had been so swollen in the hospital and they probably hadn’t been able to get shoes on her feet, or tights. She looked larger than she had in life and yet there was something almost two-dimensional about her form. The outfit, the silver headband in her hair with five pink roses in a row along the top—all of it made her look like a wedding cake. She would never have stood for it! She would have screamed and thrashed, yanked at the bows, thrown off the headband. I pulled at Howard’s sleeve trying to find his hand so we could run and run. We had to get away, couldn’t stand the heat and the pressure from the crowd to move forward.
“Howard,” I screamed under my breath. He was staring at the body. The tears running down his cheeks were soaking into his stiff white collar.
“My Lord, Theresa looked awful yesterday when I saw her. I made her sit down and tell me all about it.” The voice from behind us had a high buzzing quality, like a dentist’s drill. I couldn’t keep from turning, to see back around the corner. She was a monstrous old bag with innumerable moles on her face, underneath the powder and the deep pink rouge, a color not found in nature. She had come from a meeting, some happy gathering which required a “Hello! My name is——” sticker. It was beginning to peel and curl along the edges. She was, according to her tag, Mrs. M. L. Glevitch, and she had as good as seized me: I could not take my eyes off of her. The makeup stopped abruptly at her neck. She was wearing a blue polyester long-sleeved dress that probably had all the comfort of a garbage bag, and thick, dark brown stockings and heavy oxblood red shoes—brogans, I thought must be the word for shoes of such weight. She took her large, dark blue handbag and mashed a bug on her arm with it. She and her friend must have cut in line, because they hadn’t been there before. “You will not believe this.” Mrs. Glevitch lowered her voice. “Theresa insisted that the undertakers put a diaper on Lizzy.” She looked at her friend next to her, tucking a corner of her bottom lip into her mouth, widening her eyes, and nodding her head just once. “Theresa
got hysterical when the Swanson brothers requested underpants. That sweet girl screamed. I was there to pick up Lois Wright’s death certificate for Otis. I heard Theresa with my own ears. I heard her scream”—she lowered her voice still further to a forced whisper—“ ‘Lizzy’s not even toilet trained.’ ”
The friend shook her head and clicked her tongue against her teeth.
“And then Chas Swanson, he took Theresa by the elbow and led her into his office, put his arm around her, said anything she wanted would be fine—”
“There she is,” the friend said, pushing against me to see around the corner to the bier.
“Chas Swanson,” Mrs. Glevitch went on, ignoring her friend, “sees death two-three times a week at least, and he was crying himself. I saw him wiping his eyes with his handkerchief after Theresa left.”
I turned to look at Lizzy again. Her short brown hair was dull and kempt. On her chest, her strange flat hands molded around it, was her bear. It had been pink when she was born, but it was gray now and the nose had been bitten off. In a circle around the bier were her things: the Sesame Street pop-up toy, the jack-in-the-box, four rag dolls, a Cabbage Patch preemie named Spencer, a cobbler’s bench with one of the pegs missing, and a Fisher-Price barn with the fence, the silo, and the animals set up at their troughs.
I groped for Howard’s arm, his wrist, his suit coat, anything to grab hold of, and at the same moment something from behind that felt like a large vinyl purse poked me.
“No,” I said to Howard, “don’t force me.” I began to cry as I said again, “Don’t force me.” I turned around, tripping over the brogans, stepped flat on someone’s sandals, and then pushed my way past the sweating people in the doorway. Once I was in the parking lot I lit out. I ran without seeing, past the cars, down into the ravine, across the highway, and into the Jacksons’ cornfield. I was sure I could hear her, Mrs. M. L. Glevitch, telling everybody, announcing through her megaphone, that the pathologically sick girl was running from the funeral. What a story she could make of it, having seen it with her own eyes! Not to mention the fact that her own steel-toed shoes had been stepped on by the girl herself! There had been no doubt in her mind right off that the tall
blond one was the culprit; you could tell by the eyes shifting, not daring to look at you straight.
I ran until I got to a grove of trees, a narrow, wooded corridor that rose steeply above the field. I climbed and stumbled, grabbing at thin, tender saplings, breaking them while great clods of dirt rolled down the incline. I kicked a rotting trunk so hard I fell down and sat. My pumps were covered with dirt and dust. I pulled them off, threw them aside. “Come back,” I whispered. “Come back.” The crumbling earth was rough and uneven and cool. It felt good to lie down. Even up on high the ground was quaking from the traffic out on the highway. I remember hearing a truck with muffler problems, roaring in the distance. I remember thinking that there wasn’t anyone who could help me, no one who could comfort me, no place to go for forgiveness. I had the notion that maybe, just maybe, the roar was the Giant Earth-Moving Machine, the Gem of Egypt, coming to pick me up in its massive claw and rock me back and forth, back and forth, until I was fast asleep.
Chapter Five
——
N
ELLIE STOOD BY THE
stove frying bacon the morning after the funeral. She was telling me how her world had collapsed when her second son was stillborn. She was carefully turning the sizzling meat with a fork, saying that she had labored twenty hours, and before she could speak her mind they knocked her out. “When I woke up no one said anything. I asked where my baby was and the nurses just went about their business, Ho hum. The doctor came in around ten and told me. Walt was away on business and couldn’t get home because of snow.”
I knew she was making a valiant attempt to help me come out of myself, to make me aware of the fact that other people had also suffered. I stared at the table thinking only that Nellie and I were nothing alike. Mother Nature, with her own irrefutable logic, was to blame for the son’s attenuated beginning and premature end. There was no reason for Lizzy’s death, no cause except carelessness.
“His birthday comes and I still feel the loss,” Nellie was saying.
“Huh,” I said, stirring my cereal. I had long since been the age to inflict damage, and yet I hadn’t gotten used to the fact that my own generation had inherited the earth for the time being. The boy I had
shared a post-office box with in college was the head architect for a forty-million-dollar museum in Fort Worth. It seemed improbable that a thirty-two-year-old knew enough to keep such a large structure from caving in. There was fear and danger in everything, and it was a wonder we weren’t all paralyzed by the possibility of death, the threat of disaster in the routine pleasures of cars, toasters, the air, tuna fish, our friends. Nellie might have done something that seemed to her reasonable, such as scrubbing the bathtub with a powerful cleaning agent, only to find that it had leached through to her skin and into her blood and killed her child.
Despite my rational mind that had always kept me from faith; in spite of the fact that I had always suffered from what I had, in the 1980s, been able to identify as low self-esteem, I couldn’t help feeling that I was more wretched than nearly anyone who had ever lived. As Nellie prattled on, it occurred to me that Howard was no doubt heaving and sweating in a far field, working, and at the same time keeping his own pain at bay, by putting it into a historical perspective. And so I tried, for a minute, to make myself feel smaller and happier than others before me who had been accused. I raced through all of the history I could think of, past the ancient Romans who had certainly sullied their hands with their relations’ blood, past the Rosenbergs, the Nixons, John Hinckley, Jr.’s parents, past the nameless multitudes serving time for momentary lapses and crimes of desperation. It was no comfort knowing that others had gone before me. It was despicable, I knew, that where there should have been ordinary grief in my heart, there was, in its place, shame and dread. My remorse, my inability to make amends, was undiluted, stronger, I was sure, than those of any of the guilty characters I could conjure or name.
“I tried to go back and think of all the things I did during the nine months that might have caused the trouble.” Nellie was still talking, laying out the bacon on a paper towel. “Even though there wasn’t the awareness there is today, I had been careful, and I certainly didn’t smoke or drink.”
It was eight o’clock in the morning and Emma and Claire were in the living room in front of the television, within its electromagnetic field, watching cartoon characters beat each other over the head with bananas. I’m going to march in there, I thought, and smash the set. Why had we
ever allowed the children to watch cartoons? I had always said that letting them sit before the tube was as bad as feeding them a diet of Hostess Ding Dongs, and yet I also was often too tired to think of alternatives. All the harsh words, the spanking, the swearing, being weak when I should have been firm—the panorama, the complete history of what I had done wrong appeared before me in living color, and the garbled profanities thundered in my ears. I pushed my chair back while Nellie was still talking, went straight to the television, and punched at the large black buttons. The image sputtered and then vanished.
“Turn that back on!” Emma shouted. Claire chanted, “On. On.”
When I shook my head, snapping it back and forth, Emma said, “I hate you, Mom. I HATE YOU.”
“Emma, lamb,” Nellie said, coming into the living room with a dish towel in one hand and a plate in the other, “don’t talk to your mother like that.”
“But I want the TV on,” Claire whined.
Emma crossed her arms and turned her head, giving her grandmother the view of her exquisite dirty neck, and the Goodwin Cro-Magnon jaw. It was perhaps hard for a five-year-old to respect an older woman who was fixated on her granddaughters’ bowel patterns, who referred to the effort as “doing your duty.” Emma’s gaze fell on the Barbie with the long black tresses and she grabbed it, waving it in Claire’s face, tormenting her by the evident fact of possession. “That’s mine!” Claire cried on cue. “Emmie has mine!”