Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (45 page)

Everything changed for me after Clinton’s visit. I stopped going into the village and began spending all my time with Aunty Talking to the Dead. I followed her everywhere, carried her loads without complaint, memorized remedies and mixed potions. I wanted to know what
she
knew; I wanted to make what had happened at the Hayashis’ go away. Not just in other people’s minds. Not just because I’d become a laughingstock, like Clinton said. But because I knew that I
had
to redeem myself for that one thing, or my moment—the single
instant of glory for which I had lived my entire life—would be snatched beyond my reach forever.

Meanwhile, there were other layings-out. The kitemaker who hanged himself. The crippled boy from Chicken Fight Camp. The Vagrant. The Blindman. The Blindman’s dog.

“Do like I told you,” Aunty would say before each one. Then, “Give it time,” when it was done.

But it was like living the same nightmare over and over—just one look at a body and I was done for. For twenty-five years, people in the village joked about my “indisposition.” Last year, when my mother died, her funeral was held at the Paradise Mortuary. I stood outside on the cement walk for a long time, but never made it through the door. Little by little, I had given up hope that my moment would ever arrive.

Then, one week ago, Aunty caught a chill after spending all morning out in the rain, gathering
awa
from the garden. The chill developed into a fever, and for the first time since I’d known her, she took to her bed. I nursed her with the remedies she’d taught me—sweat baths, eucalyptus steam, tea made from
ko’oko’olau
—but the fever worsened. Her breathing became labored, and she grew weaker. My few hours of sleep were filled with bad dreams. In desperation, aware of my betrayal, I finally walked to a house up the road and telephoned for an ambulance.

“I’m sorry, Aunty,” I kept saying, as the flashing red light swept across the porch. The attendants had her on a stretcher and were carrying her out the front door.

She reached up and grasped my arm, her grip still strong. “You’ll do okay, Yuri,” the old woman whispered hoarsely, and squeezed. “Clinton used to get so scared, he messed his pants.” She chuckled, then began to cough. One of the attendants put an oxygen mask over her face. “Hush,” he said. “There’ll be plenty of time for talking later.”

The day of Aunty’s wake, workmen were repaving the front walk and had blocked off the main entrance to the Paradise Mortuary. They had dug up the old concrete tiles and carted them away. They’d left a mound of gravel on the grass, stacked some bags of concrete next to it, and covered them with black tarps. There was an empty wheelbarrow parked on the other side of the gravel mound. The entire front lawn was roped off and a sign put up which said, “Please use the back entrance. We are making improvements in Paradise. The Management.”

My stomach was beginning to play tricks, and I was feeling a little dizzy. The old panic was mingled with an uneasiness which had not left me ever since I had decided to call the ambulance. I kept thinking maybe I shouldn’t have called it since she had gone and died anyway. Or maybe I should have called it sooner. I almost turned back, but I thought of what Aunty had told me about Clinton and pressed ahead. Numbly, I followed the two women in front of me through the garden along the side of the building, around to the back.

“So, old Aunty Talking to the Dead has finally passed on,” one of them, whom I recognized as the Dancing School Teacher, said. She was with Pearlie Mukai, an old classmate of mine from high school. Pearlie had gone years ago to live in the city, but still returned to the village to visit her mother.

I was having difficulty seeing—it was getting dark, and my head was spinning so.

“How old do you suppose she was?” Pearlie asked.

“Gosh, even when we were kids it seemed like she was at least a hundred.”

“‘The Undead,’ my brother used to call her.”

Pearlie laughed. “When we misbehaved,” the Dancing School Teacher said, “my mother used to threaten to send us to Aunty Talking to the Dead. She’d be giving us the licking of
our lives and hollering, ‘This is gonna seem like nothing, then!’”

Aunty had been laid out in one of the rooms along the side of the house. The heavy, wine-colored drapes had been drawn across the windows, and all the wall lamps turned very low, so it was darker in the room than it had been outside.

Pearlie and the Dancing School Teacher moved off into the front row. I headed for the back.

There were about thirty of us at the wake, mostly from the old days—those who had grown up on stories about Aunty, or who remembered her from before the Paradise Mortuary.

People were getting up and filing past the casket. For a moment, I felt faint again, but I remembered about Clinton (how self-assured and prosperous he looked standing at the door, accepting condolences!), and I got into line. The Dancing School Teacher and Pearlie slipped in front of me.

I drew nearer and nearer to the casket. I hugged my sweater close. The room was air-conditioned and smelled of floor disinfectant and roses. Soft music came from speakers mounted on the walls.

Now there were just four people ahead. Now three. I looked down on the floor, and I thought I would faint.

Then Pearlie Mukai shrieked, “Her eyes!”

People behind me began to murmur.

“What, whose eyes?” the Dancing School Teacher demanded.

Pearlie pointed to the body in the casket.

The Dancing School Teacher peered down and cried, “My God, they’re open!”

My heart turned to ice.

“What?” voices behind me were asking. “What about her eyes?”

“She said they’re open,” someone said.

“Aunty Talking to the Dead’s eyes are open,” someone else said.

Now Clinton was hurrying over.

“That’s because she’s not dead,” still another voice put in.

Clinton looked into the coffin, and his face turned white. He turned quickly around again, and waved to his assistants across the room.

“I’ve heard about cases like this,” someone was saying. “It’s because she’s looking for someone.”

“I’ve heard that, too! The old woman is trying to tell us something.”

I was the only one there who knew. Aunty was talking to
me
. I clasped my hands together, hard, but they wouldn’t stop shaking.

People began leaving the line. Others pressed in, trying to get a better look at the body, but a couple of Clinton’s assistants had stationed themselves in front of the coffin, preventing anyone from getting too close. They had shut the lid, and Chinky Malloy was directing people out of the room.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for coming here this evening,” Clinton was saying. “I hope you will join us at the reception down the hall.”

While everyone was eating, I stole back into the parlor and quietly—ever so quietly—went up to the casket, lifted the lid, and looked in.

At first, I thought they had switched bodies on me and exchanged Aunty for some powdered and painted old grandmother, all pink and white, in a pink dress, and clutching a white rose to her chest. But the pennies had fallen from her eyes—and there they were. Open. Aunty’s eyes staring up at me.

Then I knew. In that instant, I stopped trembling. This
was
it
: my moment had arrived. Aunty Talking to the Dead had come awake to bear me witness.

I walked through the deserted front rooms of the mortuary and out the front door. It was night. I got the wheelbarrow, loaded it with one of the tarps covering the bags of cement, and wheeled it back to the room where Aunty was. It squeaked terribly, and I stopped often to make sure no one had heard me. From the back of the building came the clink of glassware and the buzz of voices. I had to work quickly—people would be leaving soon.

But this was the hardest part. Small as she was, it was very hard to lift her out of the coffin. She was horribly heavy, and unyielding as a bag of cement. It seemed like hours, but I finally got her out and wrapped her in the tarp. I loaded her in the tray of the wheelbarrow—most of her, anyway; there was nothing I could do about her feet sticking out the front end. Then, I wheeled her through the silent rooms of the mortuary, down the front lawn, across the village square, and up the road, home.

Now, in the dark, the old woman is singing.

I have washed her with my own hands and worked the salt into the hollows of her body. I have dressed her in white and laid her in flowers.

Aunty, here are the beads you like to wear. Your favorite cakes. A quilt to keep away the chill. Here is
noui
for the heart and
awa
for every kind of grief.

Down the road a dog howls, and the sound of hammering echoes through the still air. “Looks like a burying tomorrow,” the sleepers murmur, turning in their warm beds.

I bind the sandals to her feet and put the torch to the pyre.

The sky turns to light. The smoke climbs. Her ashes scatter, filling the wind.

And she sings, she sings, she sings.

Contributors

Sherman Alexie
is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene from Wellpinit, Washington. He is the author of two novels,
Indian Killer
and
Reservation Blues
. He adapted his story collection
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
into the 1998 Miramax film
Smoke Signals
. He is at work on
The Bones of Al Capone
, a novel.

Laura Boss
is founder and editor of
LIPS
. She was a first-place winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Gordon Barber Award and a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. Her books include the Alta Award-winning
On the Edge of the Hudson
and
Reports from the Front.

Mary Bucci Bush
is an associate professor of creative writing at California State University Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in
Ploughshares, Story
, and
Missouri Review
. William Morrow & Co. published her story collection,
A Place of Light
, in 1990.

Bebe Moore Campbell
is the best-selling author of
Singing in the Comeback Choir, Brothers and Sisters
, and
Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine
, which won the NAACP Image Award for fiction. Her memoir is entitled
Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad
.

Nash Candelaria
is the author of a collection of short stories,
The Day the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne
. He won an
American Book Award for his novel
Not by the Sword
. His other novels include
Memories of the Alhambra
and
Inheritance of Strangers
.

Veronica Chambers,
the author of
Mama’s Girl
, is a former editor at
The New York Times Magazine
and
Premiere
. Currently she is a contributing editor at
Glamour
. She is coauthor with John Singleton of the film
Poetic Justice
.

Frank Chin
is the author of two plays,
Chickencoop Chinaman
and
The Year of the Dragon
. He has also written a book of short stories,
The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R. R. Co.
and two novels,
Donald Duk
and
Gunga-Din Highway
.

Sandra Cisneros
was born in 1954 in Chicago. In 1985, her first work of fiction,
The House on Mango Street
, was awarded the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. Her other books include
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
and
My Wicked Wicked Ways
, poems.

Judith Ortiz Cofer
was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. Her books include
The Latin Deli: Prose & Poetry, The Line of the Sun
(a novel), and several volumes of poetry. Her collection of personal essays is entitled
Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood
.

Enid Dame’
s fiction has appeared in
Confrontation, Fiction,
and
Sing Heavenly Muse!
, among other journals. She received a grant from the Puffin Foundation in 1997 to work on a novel. She is coeditor of
Home Planet News
.

Diane di Prima
was born in Brooklyn, New York. An important writer of the Beat movement, she has lived in California for the past thirty years. She is the author of thirty-four books of poetry and prose. Her memoir,
Recollections of My Life as a Woman
, is forthcoming from Viking.

E. L. Doctorow
was born in the Bronx during the Depression and now lives in a suburbs of New York City. He is the author of a collection of stories,
Lives of the Poets,
and several novels, including
The Book of Daniel, Ragtime
, and
World’s Fair
.

Louise Erdrich
was born in Minnesota and is of German-American and Chippewa descent. She has written two collections of poetry,
Jacklight
and
Baptism of Desire
. Her first novel,
Love Medicine
, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other novels include
The Bingo Palace
and
Tracks
.