The Dearly Departed (9 page)

“Technically? I don't think you actually lost consciousness,” said Dickie. “I think you got woozy.”

“I want to greet people standing up. It seems the least I can do.”

“There are no rules,” said Roberta. “We encourage our mourners to do what feels right to them and not to worry about”—she flexed two fingers on each side of her face—“doing the ‘right thing.' For example, the fact that you're wearing navy blue tonight, and it's sleeveless? With dangly earrings? Well, why not? There used to be an unwritten rule that anything but black and long sleeves was wrong, but times have changed. If you'd worn red, we wouldn't have said a word.”

Sunny got to her feet, gripped the back of her metal chair with both hands, and straightened her shoulders. “Unlock the door,” she ordered.

Those who couldn't conjure a distinct recollection of Margaret made one up: Cora Poole, whose late husband owned Fashionable Fabrics, said she remembered, as if it were yesterday, Margaret and Sunny picking out a pattern and powder-pink piqué for Sunny's senior prom dress.

“Are you sure?” asked Sunny. “I don't think I went to the senior prom.”

“Everyone goes,” said Mrs. Poole. “It was a Simplicity pattern, and you trimmed it in pink and white embroidered daisies that we sold by the yard.”

“It's coming back to me,” said Sunny.

Janine Sopp, L.P.N., said she was on duty the night Sunny was born at Saint Catherine's and took care of her in the newborn nursery.

“But I moved here when I was two,” said Sunny.

“You couldn't have,” said Mrs. Sopp. “I remember you had a high bilirubin count and we put you under the lights.”

“Then you must be right,” murmured Sunny.

Mourners testified to being present at all of Margaret's performances, to clapping louder and longer than anyone else to spur multiple curtain calls. Endless Community Players—co-stars, seamstresses, scenery painters, ushers—formed their own receiving line. Sunny's Brownie troop leader, pediatrician, children's room librarian, the Abner Cotton board, the mayor, the superintendent of schools, and the mechanic who had serviced Margaret's car all clasped Sunny's hand between both of theirs. Invitations issued from every trembling set of lips: Would Sunny come to Sunday dinner? Care to play eighteen holes? Borrow the videotape of a dress rehearsal of
Two for the Seesaw
? Mr. DeMinico, still the principal of King George Regional, still dressed in shiny brown, still resting his folded hands on the paunch bulging above his belt, asked Sunny to attend commencement as his special guest.

Dry-eyed at last, Sunny said, “Perhaps you recall that I didn't attend my own graduation.”

He squinted into the distance, nodded curtly at several alums. “Did you get your diploma? I think Mrs. Osborn mailed it the next day.”

“No,” said Sunny. “My mother went by herself and picked it up for me.”

“We called your name,” he said, “and even though we had asked everyone to hold their applause until the end, there was a lot of clapping.”

“So I heard.”

“In recognition, I guess you could say. If I remember correctly, your mother initiated it.” He glanced toward the coffin.

“That's not the version I got. What I heard was that a couple of girls yelled, ‘Yay, Sunny!' Something to that effect.”

“You may be right,” said Mr. DeMinico.

“Which of course meant that the boys had to boo—”

“Just the athletes.”

“All I did was make the varsity,” said Sunny. “All I needed was one adult to stand up for me, one adult besides my mother, who thought that maybe having someone with a single-digit handicap would be good for the team and good for the school.”

“I didn't mean to upset you,” said Mr. DeMinico.

“Now? Or do you mean then?”

“I can't turn back the clock. I meant now. On this occasion.”

Behind him, an elderly woman in a black picture hat complained, “There's a long line. Some of us have been here since twenty to seven.”

“My fault,” said Sunny, and reached around to take the woman's gloved hand.

“You don't know me,” said the woman, “but I had the same standing appointment as your mother did for our hair—hers with Jennifer and mine with Lorraine—side by side.” Her voice quivered. “A lovely woman. Top-drawer. That's all I need to say, because you know better than anyone.”

“Is Jennifer here?” asked Sunny.

The woman looked behind her, leaning left then right. “There she is. Jennifer! Come meet Margaret's daughter.” She fluttered her hands. “Hurry up. She asked for you.”

Jennifer had radically chic and severe hair for King George, bangs short and straight, dark roots showing on purpose, blunt orange hair to her jaw. “I liked your mother a lot,” she told Sunny. “She could have switched to a Boston salon—a lot of the local actresses did that once they saw their name in lights. But not your mother. She even gave me a credit in the playbills. I'll never forget that. She was as loyal as they come.”

“I know,” said Sunny.

“A brick,” said the elderly woman.

“I'll be moving along now,” said the principal.

Jennifer reached up to touch Sunny's hair. “You don't get this from her,” she said.

Regina Pope was hurt to see a hairdresser summoned to the front of the line ahead of herself, but she understood: She had married the enemy. Worse, the enemy commander. Mrs. Batten had had to go to DeMinico with a season's worth of Sunny's scorecards and make her case. There was a federal law, she'd said, and she knew a lawyer. Sunny showed up at the next practice—all shiny new lady's clubs and ironed culottes—to discover that no one had told the boys. Captain Randy Pope fashioned the unwritten rule: Make her life miserable. Move her ball. Drag your spikes in her line.

Sunny didn't complain. Only Regina knew about the dead carp in her golf bag. Mrs. Batten would have cried, and Coach Sweet would have pretended to disapprove and would have made the boys stand in a row, like at a military tribunal, until one confessed. Over sandwiches in the drab green basement lunchroom, Sunny pronounced Randy Pope an idiot. She'd removed the rotting, stinking, dead-eyed carp and left it on the hood of his Tercel. In world history the next day, he repeatedly turned around, his mouth annular, his lips parting and puckering idiotically. Even Mr. Cutler, usually in the thrall of varsity athletes, told Randy to face front and stop doing whatever he was doing or there would be consequences. Regina thought Randy was cute—the top layer of his hair went blond around the middle of May—but she loyally took on her friend's grudge as her own. At Senior Honors Day, Sunny received an award that a handful of women teachers had paid for themselves: a silver-plated loving cup inscribed to “Sondra ‘Sunny' Batten, the graduating senior who, in the judgment of the faculty, breaks ground in the area of sports leadership.” The audience gave Sunny one of those slow-spreading, person-by-person standing ovations, and even though the winner appeared stunned as she shook Mr. DeMinico's hand, her best friend knew that the look in Sunny's eye had been not one of gratitude but of irony.

Four years later, Regina ran into Randy Pope leaving the Orpheus in West Lovell, after seeing a movie that Regina thought might be emblematic of a change in his worldview. It was
Thelma and Louise,
to which neither had brought a date or a friend. He invited her to a muffin house, where he drank herbal tea and told Regina he was embarrassed when he looked back at how he had acted in high school. As soon as she got home, she called her friend.

“Did he mention me specifically—I mean, the War Against Sunny?”

“
I
did. I said, ‘You certainly were a jerk when it came to Sunny Batten. What did she ever do to you besides beat you at match play?' ”

“You said that?”

“More or less. A little more politely than that. But he knew exactly what I was talking about.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he was ashamed of himself, the old him. He said if there were such a thing as a time machine, he'd set it back to the first day you came to practice.”

“And then what?”

“He'd say, ‘Welcome to the team, Sunny. We're all behind you.' ”

“It's an act! Nobody changes that much in four years, especially a jock. He thinks if he acts humble and admits to being a jerk in high school, you'll fall at his big feet.”

“He looks different,” said Regina. “He has a goatee and a mustache. It looks a little Shakespearean. And he's thinking of joining the Peace Corps. B.U. humbled him, and that's a direct quote.”

“Meaning, he learned that swaggering around the halls of B.U. didn't get him what he wanted.”

After a pause, Regina said, “I really think he's different. Or maybe he's not so different. I mean, how would we know? Neither one of us ever had a conversation with him in high school.”

“For a reason!” said Sunny. “He started the deep freeze. If he hadn't started it, or if he had come around, it wouldn't have been so painful.”

“Mr. Sweet should've helped. That's what Randy said: ‘Too bad Coach didn't threaten to throw us off the team.' ”

“Maybe he'd like to apologize to me now,” said Sunny. “Maybe you could give him my phone number and he could call and say, ‘I'm sorry I painted a bull's-eye on your back. Sorry I couldn't be big enough to recognize that a girl could beat me in golf. Sorry I was the biggest asshole on the team.' ”

After a pause, Regina said, “You sound so bitter. More so now than when you were living through it.”

“Not more bitter,” said Sunny. “Just more willing to say it out loud.”

She'd been invited to their wedding, but sent her regrets. Regina didn't mail Sunny a birth announcement, but after six months wrote a note and enclosed a photo of Robert, bald, drooling, happy. If Sunny sent a baby present, Regina didn't remember what it was. But here was her son, two years and two months, the only child at the wake, asleep on her shoulder, too heavy for a wait this long. Women in line whispered, “Look at the little angel. Look how big he is. Sound asleep. Good as gold. She was Sunny's best friend growing up, you know. Regina Tramonte. Regina
Pope.
Married Fran's boy.”

The line inched forward. Warm hands and cold ones clasped Sunny's. Shapes and voices moved past her, and on to view Margaret. Some hurried by, crossing themselves, but most touched the ebonized wood of her coffin, touched her hands, mouthed good-bye, hurried down the steps of the stage and back up the theater's center aisle.

“Sunny?” said the last person in line. “I hope it was okay to come.”

Then Regina folded her free arm around Sunny's neck, and the baby was squeezed between them, and even Dickie Saint-Onge felt an unaccustomed lump in his throat.