She explodes. Or no—maybe she burns more slowly. Maybe my father and brother are made to hear the sighing of her burning flesh, smell the terrible flesh stench of death as she disappears slowly in the snow. She shrieks, one last time, only a mouth left now, the brain dead, but the mouth still shrieking in the excruciating heat.
Then silence, but the silence does not last for very long. It is replaced by something unidentifiable at first, barely audible. It is replaced by the sighing of burning flesh. All year long it has been the sound in the background. It has been the sound in the background all year long. And it never stops. No matter how long we live or how far away we go, it never really stops.
Did my father try to find her withered hand? Did he cradle the head with the mouth in it that shrieked and shrieked?
She was my mother. She was probably just beginning her New Year’s resolutions.
The Ford Motor Company never sent us an apology. Fletcher gathered as best he could information that might be useful in a lawsuit, but he fell apart almost as soon as he began. Neither Father nor I had the heart to pursue it. Retribution was a pallid emotion in the spectrum we were feeling. My father could not see the use of it; Ford would feel nothing and we would be made to sit in the courtroom and gape at giant blow ups of the car and the remains of her body. It was Aunt Lucy who pursued the lawsuit finally, displaying the same courage and tenacity I imagined she once did when my mother was so sure she was bleeding to death, long ago.
There was a flurry of excitement among the senior executives at Ford. They had not counted on a distinguished writer being incinerated in their Pinto. If they had thought such a thing was possible, they might have thought twice about what I am convinced they knew was the fatal position of the gas tank. They did not care at all about my mother. They did not care that they had taken away one of the country’s most original, most authentic voices. What they cared about was the publicity, the unknown numbers who would remember “the Pinto incident” because of this Christine Wing, whoever she was.
An added nuisance to an already irritating Monday, Charles Walcott thought, closing his briefcase and rushing to a meeting. In the hall he met Sullivan. “And the icing on the cake is this,” Sullivan said, “she’s got some wise-ass son, some antiwar type who’s gonna try to run us right the fuck into the ground.”
Mrs. Walcott, at home in Scarsdale, ordered the maid to intercept all incoming magazines and newspapers. Her husband’s high blood pressure, already out of hand, would skyrocket with all this. They must do their best to keep it from him. “Christine Wing Killed in Ford Pinto.” “Ford Under Scrutiny.” “Walcott of Ford Denies Pinto a Safety Hazard.”
If it had only been someone else, she thought, there would be a two-inch article buried somewhere near the back of the paper. An insignificant lawsuit would be initiated, and quietly the family would be compensated. “It’s just not fair,” Mrs. Walcott sighed to Winnifred the maid. “It wasn’t Ford’s fault, after all.” But Walcott, leaving the meeting, saw my mother’s face on the front page of all the local newspapers and all the national newspapers, and a barrage of obscenities spewed like exhaust from his mouth. He did not have the imagination or the knowledge to suspect the front-page headlines of the newspapers in France, in Germany, in England, in Canada, in Italy, in Mexico, in Brazil, in Africa, in Russia, in Poland, in Greece, in Israel, in Czechoslovakia, in Norway, in Holland, in Denmark, in Belgium, in Sweden .
She was my mother, Mr. Walcott. She was probably just starting her New Year’s resolutions.
My mother’s wake was filled with flowers. They came from every corner of the earth and continued to arrive all day and all night. They could not be contained by the walls of the room her coffin was in; they spilled into the other rooms of the great mansion, which was the funeral parlor, and filled them. People floated like sleepwalkers from one doorway to another, dizzied by the awful perfumes of death.
The funeral parlor was filled with the people who loved my mother. There were relatives, there were friends, there were reviewers, there were people she had never known but who knew her through her work. They came with stories, they came holding her books. They kept coming and coming, endlessly, in tremendous white clouds of grief. There was so much grief that, even in this place which was made to hold grief, the walls seemed to tremble and the floor to give way. The funeral directors stood against the collapsing walls and charted the unstable weather of the room. To those mourners who stayed long enough, there came a time when they passed through the heavy, cloudlike sorrow to the other side where there erupted a black wind of anger. It swirled around the room in a twisting so great that it threatened to level the funeral parlor with its violence. It blew our hair back away from our faces. It tore our clothes. It circled the room and grew fiercer and fiercer. “Why?” the mourners howled, raising their windy fists, their mouths in horror frozen open, in rage. The circle tightened.
Fletcher and I sat next to the coffin and did not move. Those who had known her from college gave out great cries when they saw me sitting next to it. I must have looked enough as they remembered her from school to confuse them for a moment. Preparing to see her dead, they saw her alive instead, and young again, the way they remembered her best—twenty-five years earlier, and their own pasts, too, came alive through me. They were young women again, their whole lives yet to live. And in my ruined face they saw her face as a young woman looking into some unbearable future that only she seemed capable of seeing. One always had that impression of my mother—that she somehow knew everything in advance. It was true of her in college, probably even as a little girl—that she held the whole of her life inside her. It pained us all terribly to think of it: she had probably seen her own death, maybe even felt it, many times during her life.
“Oh, Mommy,” I say into my quiet apartment, feeling finally the burden of her life entire in me, the way I have never felt it before, not even last January at the actual wake, and tears run down my face.
Fletcher patted me on the knee with his bandaged paw like some gentle monster. Fletcher and I sat next to the coffin and did not move. Our father, who stayed with her or what he must have sensed was her, through the entire ordeal, hovered, hanging in space like an awkward dark bird circling over death. He was quite badly burned, Fletcher said. He must have been in a great deal of physical pain. He had followed her from the accident to the hospital where he refused to be admitted, and from the hospital to the funeral parlor where she had been placed in her coffin. He did not leave her side once. When I came in just off the train from Poughkeepsie, he was still wearing the clothes from the accident. I think some of my mother’s ashes must have been in his hair.
Fletcher and I sat next to the coffin and did not move.
Once we sat next to our mother on a blazing beach in high summer. “Don’t move,” Father said to us sternly. “Don’t move.” We did not realize that we had been appointed her lifeguards while my father went to get the doctor. We did not move a muscle. Once we lay without moving next to her on her bed, hoping that she might forget we were there so that we could stay near her a little longer.
A friend of my parents, one of the first to arrive at the wake, insisted on exchanging clothes with Father so that he would have something clean to wear. They went in the back to change. Fletcher and I sat next to the coffin and did not move. The clothes were too small for him. The jacket sleeves stopped just below his elbows, the pants well above his ankles. Fletcher got up suddenly and went over to him, and, with his bandaged hands, he slowly tied Father’s tie, said something to him, and came back. My father stood there and vacantly watched people come up and linger at the coffin. His shoes were singed. The soles had separated into layers.
“Oh, Fletcher,” I said, looking away from the unbearable image of my father, “remember that early, early morning that you and Dad and I visited Grandma at the nursing home right before she died?”
Fletcher nodded.
“Remember how she did the tarantella on the front lawn? Oh, Fletcher, remember how happy she was!”
“Grandma never did that,” Fletcher said sadly, looking at me and then looking back at the chestnut coffin. “Grandma never did that, Vanessa.”
I felt a great pressure on my chest as if all the air had suddenly left the room and some new tremendous wave of sorrow was moving in. I looked to the doorway.
“Fletcher,” I said, breathlessly, “over there.” And even my father turned around, sensing something enormous through the layers and layers of his despair.
I stood up and moved in front of the coffin. “Grandpa Sarkis,” I said to the fat old man who stepped into the room. No coat to fit him, he wore an exotic silk wrap, blood red and black.
“No,” he said, shaking his head sadly, stepping back, not wanting me still.
I sat back down next to my brother and watched this colossal man run his hand hypnotically over the smooth wood, as if trying to conjure something to help him with this. That was his fate: to outlive the child he had held in his arms, the golden girl, the dream child. When he turned from the coffin he had aged decades and could barely walk. He looked at me. “Alice,” he said. “What are you doing here?” He closed his eyes and touched my face. “My wife,” he said, “this is my wife,” introducing me to Fletcher. “How are you feeling, Alice? She’s been so sick.” He turned away, shaking his head, and slowly left the room.
White flowers grew from the walls. The snow had continued to fall. People who arrived now were completely white when they entered the room: Florence, Bethany.
When they lifted the coffin into the hearse, it was still snowing. I worried she would be cold out there. I worried she would be lost because everything in this weather looked the same. Each tree looked like every other, each field. She would be frightened. I worried she would not be able to find her way back. I worried she would suffocate under so many white flowers. My father must have felt the same way. No flowers, he said, would follow my mother from the funeral home into the cemetery. They might weigh her down. She might never rise up. As I got out of the limousine, there were only white flowers of snow—only snow, the sighing of snow, the sighing of burning flesh in the snow. I stood at the edge of the plot of snow my mother would disappear into. White flowers continued to fall from the sky, the white pressing against us, pressing us to the ground. I looked to my father, stooped with sorrow in the snow in his borrowed clothes. I watched my brother and the others lift the coffin from the hearse up the hill onto a steel platform in the snow—his bandages dragged in the snow. The priest, and Grandpa Sarkis, the press, the friends, the snow—and the terrible hole, the terrible sighing hole.
The knock at the door came just as my mother’s chestnut coffin was being lowered into the ground again, as my father pivoted in the hard snow, slipping slightly, as my brother brought his hands to his face, and as I—I cannot even see myself anymore. The knock at the door stopped the weeping, stilled the speech in the priest’s throat. The knock at the door lifted the horrible weight of snow from my mother’s chest, and I could breathe again for a moment. I wondered whether I had invented the knock, for it not only stopped her descent now but seemed to tilt her body slightly away from the great silence at the center of the earth. I opened the door slowly, unsure whether anyone would be there at all. I thought this knock might be some elegant safety device of the brain, nothing more. Opening it, though, I still wanted to believe that someone might actually be standing there, someone who would walk into the room when invited and smile and sit with me for a while. I still wanted to believe that I might not be destined always to hear and see what was not there, to love that which did not exist, to want what could never be touched.
I opened the door. Over her arm was a dark corduroy coat. She wore a long black-and-white diamonded cardigan, a tailored white shirt, and black pants. Her hair was short and dark with a few flecks of gray in it. Her nails were polished and perfectly shaped. She wore a thin gold band on her right hand. I had given up the idea of ever seeing her.
She stared at me, saying nothing. Her eyes were dark. She was still beautiful. I stepped back from her.
“Sabine,” I whispered, and tears flowed down my face. “What are you doing here?”
She extended her arm tentatively. Her hand was shaking as she touched the side of my face. As she touched me she gasped and with that intake, the breath reversing itself, I knew she was real. I could smell her perfume; I could feel her body trembling; her hand was warm.
“I never expected,” she said in a thick accent, “I never expected this. I never thought”—her voice trailed off, then came back, “I never thought you’d look so much like her.”
“Please,” I whispered. “Please don’t.”
The cat had come to the doorway where we still stood. It rubbed against Sabine’s silky leg, then moved in between mine, and then back to Sabine. She bent down and picked it up. “China,” she sighed, looking at my mother’s cat sadly, hugging it to her, burying her face in its fur. “Oh, China.” In her voice was the sorrow of the universe. In her voice was a car being hit from behind and exploding into fire.
“Please come in,” I said.
Sabine, though she said nothing, noticed it all. She recognized the desk, the lamp, the chair, the things my mother had had for years. Some of them she had bought with Sabine in France.
“I didn’t think it would be this hard,” she said. “I should not have come.”
“No, Sabine, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve always wanted to meet you. I’ve always wanted to know who you were, to see you, to look at you, to meet you just once. I have all your records,” I said shyly, and she smiled. I was nervous suddenly. I felt awkward, ill at ease, shaken; I bumped into things. She smiled again. I felt a great disorder moving in. This is not at all how my mother would have acted in such a situation, and I thought it brought Sabine some comfort to see me separate from her. But she was still saying it over and over, “I should not have come. I should go.”