Authors: Hannah Pittard
T
he problem with funeral homes is that there’s all this formality and forced solemnity. There are
expectations
. For instance, there are the two funeral directors’ expectations that Stan Pulaski’s family members are—at this very moment—emotionally crippled by their sudden and wholly unexpected loss. (Perhaps we
are
emotionally crippled, but if so, it’s a preexisting condition, not one that was spurred by our father’s actions and can therefore be healed by our time with him here today). And it’s my belief that these expectations, more than anything, are what make people behave like emotional cripples when, really, all most of us want to do at times like this is get in and get it over with. It’s what I’d like to do, anyway. I’d like to get in there, do whatever it is we’re here to do, and go home. Or go back to Sasha’s, at the very least.
The thing is, this makes me sound like I’m not having some reaction to all this. And I am. Since my time alone in the bathroom last night, I’ve been feeling—what’s the word?—
moved
. It’s not that his scribblings have, overnight, corrected whatever was wrong with us—with me and him—it’s more that I am willing, in a way I formerly was not, to see that there were depths to him. There were sides of him I couldn’t see or that he chose not to show me. All I’m saying is that there was more to the man than I suspected or allowed. And while there’s still every possibility that it’s entirely his fault, as a parent, for not exposing me to the other sides, the more interesting sides, the more honest sides, there is also the possibility that I backed him into a corner. That I made certain decisions about him that he didn’t know how to refute or lacked the energy to disagree with and so he simply assumed the role I believed him already to be fulfilling. “Giraffe,” he’d said once, and I’d watched as his hands bent and molded themselves into the head of that great animal. “Rooster,” he’d said. And I couldn’t take my eyes away.
The air smells like formaldehyde, and I feel a little light-headed. It’s possible the A/C’s laced with laughing gas. If I were a funeral director, I’d lace the air with laughing gas. It would be my first order of business on my first day on the job. I’d say,
Get these mourners drugs, and do it STAT.
We are now in the room with the coffin, and he is there, just over there, on the other side of the thin coffin wall. There is no procession. There is no line. There are two couches and we are huddled around them and periodically one or two of us stand, stretch, pretend to consider coffee, and then make their way slowly over to the man. To Stan. Where he has ostensibly been reconstructed.
Those of us who are still sitting, who have not yet wandered over—we are respectful of the quietude of the ones who have. We pretend not to see them as they approach the coffin. We pretend, when they return to our small gathering at the sofas, that we do not notice that the blood has drained slightly from their cheeks. We pretend they have gone to get coffee, nothing more. It is coffee and coffee alone that explains their absence. This is what we pretend. Ah, family!
It is only me now who has not ambled awkwardly over to the coffin. Sasha took Mindy, holding her hand, and we all pretended to look the other way. She picked up her daughter and rested her on her hip so the lanky thing could look down and see him, see what was there, what was left of him and how he looked in her freshly knitted scarf. And now they are done; they are among us once again, and it is down to me. We sit a little while longer and I can feel that there is a push for me to go. There is a tacit agreement that now it is my turn and my burden and I must go. Go and do and gratify. The sooner I have performed my duty, the sooner we can leave.
I stand. My knees feel gummy, my vision rubbery. Perhaps this is visible to the others, because now Sasha is at my side, her hand is beneath my elbow, and she is walking me, pushing me, moving me noiselessly like a Ouija planchette toward the correct answer.
“Why are you doting on me?” I say out of nowhere, not even knowing that I’d been thinking it. “Why are you making me feel special?” No one can hear us. We are too far from the sofas now and the A/C is too noisy.
“Because you seem like you need it,” she says.
We are approaching the coffin; we are approaching the edge of it.
“Need what?”
“Attention,” she says.
“That’s it?” I say.
“That’s it,” she says, and gives my elbow the slightest squeeze to let me know that we are here, that we have arrived. Finally. At long last.
There he is. Shiny. Strange. His large face with its large features. His hands, folded together, a million different animals hiding in those fingers. Oh, Stan. Oh, Dad. Sasha thinks we would have been friends, if only I hadn’t been your daughter. But that’s not exactly right, is it? We would have been friends if I’d
been
your daughter and you’d actually
been
my father. If there hadn’t existed eleven different versions of me in your life. If you could have picked me. Decided on me. Then, maybe, we would have been friends.
“Okay,” I say.
I feel sick.
“I’m good,” I say.
I start to pull away.
“Wait,” she says.
From her back pocket she removes a small piece of paper. She takes a deep breath and hands it to me.
“What’s this?”
“It was wicked of me to mention it and then not offer,” she says.
I start to unfold it.
“Wait,” she says, her hand on mine, the paper in my palm, still unopened. “If you have to read it, I understand. But what I wanted was for you to give it back to him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s not something I want to be burdened with,” she says. “I think it’s unhealthy, keeping something like this around to put on a pedestal, like it actually has answers.”
The note. Of course. How did it take me so long to understand? Between
The Egoist
and Peter’s phone call, I’d forgotten all about the note. The note from my father. To Sasha. Not to me. Not to Nell. Not to Elliot. But to Sasha.
“All this?” I say. “Just to give it back?”
“And for Mindy,” she says.
I want to turn and look at Mindy, to find her in that small crowd of family behind us, but I’m afraid I’ll catch them all watching. It’s just as important that they too go unnoticed. There is a spell at work. A funeral home spell of gravity.
“Why me?” I say. Sasha’s hand is gone from mine now. It is returned to her own person. The note is mine. It is in my palm and I know that I will never open it and I know it does not matter.
“Like you said. I want you to feel special.”
I am overcome with gratitude.
“One question,” I say. I’m looking at Stan, but I’m talking to Sasha.
“Anything,” she says.
“To write a letter. To ask you to give me that book. He must have been lucid, right?”
She puts her hand around my waist and leans into me. “No clue,” she says. Her breath is warm. She smells like the South. Like Chanel and old women and daffodils. “Not a clue in the world.”
I move the paper to my right hand, then lower it slowly to his breast pocket.
“Here?” I ask.
“Good,” she says. “All done. How’s your heart?” She looks at my chest. I follow her gaze and look down too, at my hand, my telltale hand, clutching yet again.
“My heart is fine,” I say.
Very fine. Thanks for asking. Finer than it’s been in years.
M
indy,” I say. “What’s your take on life? Where do you come down on things?”
We’ve pulled up stools to the kitchen island in order to watch Nell and Sasha slice and dice and prep for dinner. Mindy is in control of a package of M&Ms, which she’s strategically emptied onto the counter in front of her and is now arranging into tidy rows.
She raises an eyebrow and scrunches up her nose. I want to gobble her up.
“I like bread,” she says, and continues with her M&M organization.
“I like bread too.”
“But I
really
like bread,” she says, and she seems suddenly sad about it. As if, yet again, the weight of the world is on her shoulders. As if her feeling for bread is so strong it’s unmanageable and therefore a little frightening. She has a bit of our father about her. A bit of that all-or-nothing mentality. I see it peeking out at me.
“Know who else likes bread?” says Sasha, wiping her knife on her apron. “This one here.” She jabs Nell in the side with her knuckles.
Nell turns from the stove and winks at Mindy. “I do. I like bread and I like butter. In fact, I
love
butter.”
I look at Mindy; she is unimpressed with these two. As am I. I’m much more interested in my half sister and her M&Ms right now. The casual cooking banter is too kooky. It really is like they’re flirting, but maybe this is simply what friendship looks like these days. Maybe this is intimacy. It’s been a while since I’ve experienced it firsthand.
“Seriously though.” I undo a row of Mindy’s M&Ms. She corrects them and flits my hand away. “What are your plans for life? Do you have a career in mind?”
“Cashier,” she says quickly, not taking her eyes off the candy.
“A cashier?”
She nods. She’s embarrassed, I can tell. This cashier business must previously have been a secret. But she also seems privately pleased to have finally told someone.
“What kind of cashier?”
She says nothing.
“At the grocery store?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Is it bad?” She slides two M&Ms in my direction. I pick them up and pop them in my mouth. She giggles.
“No.” In fact, cashier is something I might consider this summer. Sasha’s done a good job of teaching Mindy about being open-minded. When I was a girl, if I’d told Stan I wanted to be a cashier, he’d have said, “Try again.”
“It’s great,” I add, play-knocking my shoulder into Mindy’s. “I just want to know more about you.”
Sasha turns and smiles at me, but I can see she’s dubious about my line of questioning.
“They’re so nice,” Mindy says. “And I like the buttons.”
“On the register?”
“They’re popular.”
“The buttons?”
“The cashiers!”
“Oh,” I say. “The cashiers are popular.”
“Yes.”
She is again very serious.
“And
you
want to be popular?”
“Yes.”
I nod. I wish I’d been this honest when I was young. I wish I’d known it was all right to admit to wanting friends, to wanting many friends. But I was always so ashamed. Self-r
eliance
seemed to be what was valued in our family. Popularity was for the common man. We were individuals. We needed only one another and our minds and a few solid birthday parties at Benihana.
“Popularity isn’t everything, though, right?” says Sasha, looking at her daughter.
Mindy looks down at the M&Ms and blushes. They are now divided into rows of two. She pops a pair into her mouth and I imagine Noah’s animals. There they go, two by two. It seems a fair and gentle way to kill an M&M, with a friend at its side.
“But it’s not awful either, is it?” I address this to Sasha. “I mean, is it? I wish I’d been more comfortable with popularity when I was in school. I wish I’d been less embarrassed.”
“You had friends,” says Nell.
I think about last night, sitting on the back porch, Sasha insisting my father had no real friends.
“I didn’t,” I say. “I’m not looking for sympathy. But I really didn’t. I had boyfriends.”
“Oh,” says Sasha. “She had
boy
friends. ‘Look at me, I’m Kate and I have
boy
friends.’” She does this playfully and with a singsong quality to her voice.
Mindy giggles and two more M&Ms bite the dust.
I laugh to show I’m not offended and because laughter is expected at this moment, the way solemnity was expected earlier at the funeral home. “That’s not how I meant it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” says Sasha.
“I just mean, I think I was pretty lonely for a child, especially after Nell and Elliot left.”
“I would have been nice to you,” says Sasha.
And, you know, I believe her. Even if she hadn’t liked me, she would have been kind to me. I bet she was the kind of girl who defended the kid at the back of the class who got caught picking his nose. She probably picked her own just to make him feel comfortable and to shame her classmates for being brutes. She probably ate the booger just to drive the point home.
Mindy polishes off the M&Ms. Noah’s ark is closed for business. The boat is officially at sea, bobbing about in the furious waves, waiting patiently, if not fretfully, for the promised dry land.
Elliot’s on the phone in the living room. He hasn’t said anything to me since the drive to the funeral home. After the viewing, he looked peaked. And I couldn’t tell whether it had to do with me or with Rita or with Dad. There’s a connection between fathers and sons—even ones who aren’t close—that must be beyond a daughter’s understanding. Seeing our father lying there must have been, to Elliot, a little bit like seeing himself lying there, like seeing into the future to his own death, either timely or untimely. Or maybe I’m making too much of the situation. Maybe I’m imposing significance where there isn’t any.
“What’s for dinner?” says Mindy, hopping off her stool and going around to Nell and Sasha. She is bored with me now that her M&Ms are gone.
“Indian,” says Nell, who has once again stripped down to a tank top, boxers, and an apron.
“We’re going to eat an Indian?” I say.
The three of them turn and look at me.
“Inappropriate,” says Nell.
“But funny,” I say.
Mindy bites her bottom lip and smiles. What could be better to a child than to see an adult being disciplined?
“Yum, yum, yum,” I say, ignoring Nell and Sasha and rubbing my stomach for show. “That Indian better stay in my belly.”
“Totally messed up,” says Nell, shaking her head and turning back to her pots. She’s not really annoyed. She’s just trying to set an example. We play this game all the time with Elliot’s girls. Good aunt, bad aunt; crazy aunt, sweet aunt; et cetera, et cetera.
Sasha nudges Mindy with her spatula. “It’s the Indian’s fault,” she says. “For being so tasty.” She looks at me and winks, as if to say,
You’re cool. It’s all cool.
And I think,
This family is fine. Perfectly fine, if you ask me.