The Obituary Writer (15 page)

“A girl!” Vivien had shouted.

“Really?” Lotte said, lifting her head to see for herself. “Oh, Vivvie, the fun we’ll have with her.”

Vivien hadn’t been there for either of the boys’ births. But she had watched Pamela come into the world. She had sat by her friend’s side, counting her perfect toes and fingers.
Look how long they are,
Lotte had said.
We’ll teach her piano, Viv.
They had rubbed the soft down on her bald head, deciding she would be blond and stay blond, unlike Lotte whose fair hair had darkened over the years.

She’s a keeper
, Vivien had said.

And now she was dead. Vivien stood in the doorway of the parlor and took in the scene before her. Lotte kneeling by her dead daughter, holding her hand. Pamela lay, dressed in the one dress she owned, a green velvet one Lotte had bought her in San Francisco last year.
She has to wear dresses too,
Lotte had explained when she showed Vivien the ruffly dress with its smocked bodice and lace-trimmed sleeves and neck. Her hair was too flat and her face was bloated. She hardly looked like Pamela at all.

Perhaps hearing Vivien there, Lotte glanced up. At the sight of her friend, she jumped to her feet and began to keen, wailing and rocking and screaming Pamela’s name.

This was grief, as raw as it could be. Vivien recognized it. She knew what to do.

Vivien stepped forward, and opened her arms.

This was how to help a family who just lost their child. Wash the clothes. Make soup. Don’t ask them what they need. Bring them what they need. Keep them warm. Listen to them rant and cry and tell their story over and over. Vivien did these things during the days that followed Pamela’s death. When friends came in to pay their respects, she took their coats and hung them up. She led them into the parlor, and when Lotte looked up into their faces, confused and ravaged by grief, Vivien softly said their names for her.
Adelaide and Thomas are here. Pamela’s friend Catherine. The Martinellis. The O’Briens.
Dutifully, she recorded the flowers that arrived: white lilacs, Easter lilies, white roses. She offered the guests tea and shortbread that she baked fresh each morning. She swept the floors and opened the curtains to let light inside.

Every morning, Vivien watched Robert go out into the vineyards. He needed the comfort of his work, and she didn’t question that. In her years as an obituary writer, she had seen men argue cases in court or put new roofs on houses hours after they’d lost a loved one. From the kitchen window, Vivien saw Robert methodically mowing down the crimson clover. Bo and Johnny helped their father, walking behind him and collecting what he cut down. In the late afternoon, when the work was done, they washed their hands and drank big glasses of buttermilk. Then they went outside and played mumblety-peg or marbles in the dirt until it turned too dark for them to see. Back inside, Bo avoided his mother and the parlor where she sat with his dead sister. Instead, he sat at the big wooden table in the kitchen and drew pictures of horses that he signed and handed to Vivien. Johnny, though, would go in the parlor and stand by his mother, staring down at Pamela in disbelief. His father had to lead him out of there, yanking on him as if he were uprooting vines from the earth.

But Lotte wouldn’t leave Pamela’s side. She held her dead daughter’s hand and spoke to her as if the girl could hear. She told her she was sorry.
I should have called the doctor sooner,
she said. She told her who had come by the house and how warm it had become. Sometimes she called the girl’s name, her voice rising in panic.
Pamela! Pamela!
This broke Vivien’s heart, a mother’s voice calling out to her dead child. Lotte would never again see those bright blue eyes or hear Pamela’s slightly husky voice saying Mama. When she needed to, Vivien wrapped her arms around her friend. She washed her face with one of the cloths Lotte knit by the dozens. She combed Lotte’s hair and sprinkled lavender water on her to hide the sour smell of grief that rose from her. At night, she tucked a pillow beneath Lotte’s head and covered her with a soft blanket.

The night before the funeral, the house grew quiet in its grief. The sobs that had filled it on and off for three days were temporarily silenced. Vivien stood in the semidark kitchen, setting a freshly baked pound cake on a plate. She whisked lemon juice and powdered sugar together until they were smooth. With a knitting needle she poked holes in the cake, then poured the sticky glaze on it. Tomorrow, the house would be full of mourners. Vivien needed to feed them. Oh, she knew they would come with baked casseroles, and pots of beans and soup. But she wanted to make the things she believed would bring comfort to Lotte and her family. This bitter cake. The chicken soup warming on the stove. The bread rising for the second time in the large enamel bowl. She would get up early and bake that bread so that it would be warm for them after they buried Pamela.

Vivien looked around the kitchen. It smelled of yeast and lemons. Everything was clean and polished. She wiped her hands on the apron of Lotte’s that she’d been wearing all day, a white one with a print of large red apples. The apron seemed almost happy, and therefore out of place in this house. She untied it and slipped it off, hanging it on its hook by the sink.

She needed air, she decided. She reached for one of Lotte’s hand-knit sweaters, an oatmeal-colored one with a straight neck. The sleeves were too long, and she pushed them up to her elbows before heading outside into the night.

So many stars, Vivien thought as soon as she stepped outside. Those stars and the chilly air stopped her immediately. She pulled the sleeves back down, and wrapped her arms around herself.

“It doesn’t seem right,” a voice said.

Vivien recognized it. Sebastian. In the busyness and sorrow of these past few days, she had completely forgotten about him.

“That is what you are thinking, no?” he said.

He was sitting at one of the long picnic tables, smoking a cigarette. Vivien walked over to him and sat beside him.

“Yes,” she said. “The stars shouldn’t be so bright. Nothing should look this beautiful.”

He held out his cigarette to her, and she shook her head.

“Everything should mourn the little girl,” he said.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, Sebastian smoking and Vivien gazing upward. She saw Orion’s Belt and the Little Dipper, and the sight of those constellations made her cry. Just a few months ago, she and Pamela had lain on their backs in the field and Vivien had pointed out these very stars. The hunter. The large bear. The Little Dipper. The Milky Way.

“Let’s take a walk, hmm?” Sebastian said.

Vivien followed him across the yard, into the vineyards.

“The crimson clover, it a cover crop,” he explained, as if it mattered. “It add . . .” He paused, searching. “Nu-tri-ent?”

Vivien nodded.

“To the soil, you see? Robert, he mowed it down so it will self-seed and come back again in September. For the harvest.”

When they stopped walking. Vivien dared to glance upward again, this time seeing the moon, with thin clouds passing across it.

“It’s waning,” Vivien said.

Sebastian looked up too.

“The reverse of a waxing moon is called a waning moon,” she continued. “When the moon is decreasing in brightness.”

“I think this moon is appropriate then,” Sebastian said softly.

He was looking at her, not the moon. Vivien met his gaze. She let him take a step closer to her. And then another.

“Vivien,” he said. But nothing more.

She did not consider stopping him. To do this, Vivien thought as his lips kissed her lips, was to be alive. To do this, she thought as his lips moved down her throat and to her collarbone, was to fight back at death. It had been so long since a man had touched her that Vivien felt off-balance when desire spread through her. Sebastian steadied her, holding her in his arms, which were strong from working in these fields.

Sebastian did not taste like David, He did not feel like him. His skin was rough, his mouth full of the taste of tobacco and red wine. Later, Vivien would think that she lowered to the ground first. She dropped to the damp dirt and lifted Lotte’s sweater over her head. She unbuttoned her dress, and watched as Sebastian cupped her breast, slipping it from her corset. The waning moon illuminated their naked skin as clothes dropped off each of them.

When he entered her, it was as if something she had lost was returned to her. She half sat up, surprised by that feeling.

“I remember,” she said out loud.

Sebastian paused in his movements. He lifted her so that she was sitting facing him. The shift in position sent a thrill through Vivien, and she heard herself moan.

He kissed her hard on the lips.

“Are you mine?” he whispered. But then he chuckled and shook his head. “This is not what I mean,” he said.

She told him to stop talking.

For a while that night before the funeral, Vivien remembered how it was to be alive. But when morning came and she saw Lotte’s face, the grief etched there perhaps forever, Vivien felt only shame at what she had done.

Lotte had managed to dress in an old black dress that was too tight for her more ample body.

“Vivvie,” she said at the sight of her friend putting two loaves of bread into the oven to bake. “You need to write it.”

Vivien felt flushed from the heat of the oven, and from her own guilty conscience.

“Write it?” she said.

People were approaching the house. Robert and the boys would carry the small wooden coffin up the hill to the family cemetery. Already, Robert was out there, digging Pamela’s grave.

“Pamela’s obituary,” Lotte said, her voice hoarse from crying.

“Oh, Lotte,” Vivien said. “I can’t. I only do that for people I don’t know. People I don’t love.”

The door opened and Sebastian walked in to the kitchen. Vivien could feel his eyes on her, but she refused to meet his gaze.

“But you have to,” Lotte said. “Tell the world about my Pamela, Viv. Tell them how she is, what she’s like, so no one forgets.”

“No one will forget,” Vivien said.

How she wished this man would go away. But he stood there, waiting. Her cheeks burned.

“You have to,” Lotte said again.

Vivien knew that grief made people unreasonable. Selfish. It was unrelenting and illogical.

She put her arm around her friend.

“Of course,” she said. “I will write the obituary.”

FIVE

If you see acquaintances of yours in deepest mourning, it does not occur to you to go up to them and babble trivial topics or ask them to a dance or dinner. If you pass close to them, irresistible sympathy compels you merely to stop and press their hand and pass on.

—
FROM
Etiquette
,
BY
E
MILY
P
OST, 1922

9

What Her Mother Taught Her

CLAIRE, 1961

C
laire came from a generation of women who did not question things. A generation raised by women who didn’t question. Before her mother died, during the sixteen years when they got to be mother and daughter, she’d taught Claire the things she believed a woman needed to know: always wear a hat to keep the sun off your face so you don’t get wrinkles; moisturize every day; never go to bed with your makeup on; if you put Vaseline on your hands and a pair of white cotton gloves over them and go to bed like that, your hands will always be soft; a man likes soft hands; always get up before your husband so that you can do your own morning routine in private, make yourself look pretty, and have his breakfast ready when he wakes up; keep up on current events; agree with your husband’s opinion, even if you think he’s a horse’s ass for believing that; buy lard fresh from the butcher and use it in fried chicken, piecrusts, and seven-minute frosting; the key to a perfect dinner is to serve meat with a starch and a vegetable and to always have candlelight; everything tastes better when eaten by candlelight; know how to sew a hem, darn a sock, replace a button—these skills help to make you indispensable; never go to bed with dirty dishes in the sink or cigarette butts in the ashtray; never refuse your husband’s sexual desires; get your hair done every week; when asked to bring something to a dinner party, bring it on a plate that you leave as a gift; always let the man drive; men take out the trash and mow the lawn; always wait for the man to open a door for you and light your cigarette; a woman needs to know how to swim, skate, and ride a bike; never swear in front of a man; and Claire,
honey
, love goes out the window when there’s no money. A woman knows how to live on a budget, to stretch a dollar, to cook hamburger meat at least six different ways, in patties and Salisbury steak and chili and poor man’s beef Stroganoff and Sloppy Joes and meatloaf.

Her mother spoke, and Claire listened.

“At thirty cents a pound,” her mother would say, shaping hamburger with chopped onion and Worcestershire sauce into perfect patties, “I can make four of these. One for you, one for me, two for Daddy.”

Claire watched her mother, always in a dress covered with an apron, always in high heels and earrings, move around the kitchen like it was a dance floor. The wallpaper was yellow with a pattern of red and blue teapots. The stove and refrigerator matched, both a shade of yellow that even now, when Claire saw something that color, made her think of her mother. If she closed her eyes she could even smell her mother’s L’Air du Temps and Aqua Net.

“Why does Daddy get two?” Claire asked. She sat perched on the sink with its blue plastic drainer, neat stack of Brillo pads, gold container of Borax, and the ceramic frog whose gaping mouth held sponges.

“Number one,” her mother said without breaking stride, slicing tomatoes and shredding iceberg lettuce, “because he’s worked all day, and number two because women have to watch their weight.”

On warm nights, Claire and her mother sat together on the glider on the screened-in porch and listened to the crickets. In the distance, where the houses stopped and the fields began, they could sometimes see fireflies. As a little girl, she would join other neighborhood children and collect them in an empty mayonnaise jar. Her mother poked holes in the lid so they could at least live a few hours.

“Watch,” her mother said. “They flash for six seconds, then go dark for six seconds.”

Claire watched and counted. Six seconds of flashing. Six seconds of darkness.

“Like Morse code,” her mother said.

From the basement came the sound of her father’s electric saw.

“What message are they sending?” Claire asked.

“The males are calling the females, I think. Look at me! Look at me!”

Claire smiled, but her mother looked serious, staring off at the light show.

“Are you happy?” Claire blurted, surprising herself. She had never considered such a thing before, if her mother was happy or not.

“Don’t be silly,” her mother said softly.

“What is love?” Claire used to ask her mother as they sat together at the kitchen table waiting for their nails to dry, blowing on them and waving them in the air. China Doll Red or Bermuda Pink or Coral Reef, the shiny colors glistened and her mother always answered the same way.

“You just know.”

Such an unsatisfying answer. Claire would scowl and try to figure out what her mother meant. Was love so unique, so special, that when it happened it made itself absolutely known? The way Gloria Delray performed her cheers every Saturday at football games. She shook her pompoms and shouted
Give me a W
as if no one could possibly be a better cheerleader, a prettier girl. She jumped the highest and did the most cartwheels and smiled the widest brightest smile.

“Sometimes,” Claire said softly, “I hate Gloria Delray.”

“Don’t say hate,” her mother said, predictably.

“Well then,” Claire said, blowing on her nails again, “I dislike her tremendously.”

Her mother tried to hide a smile, but Claire glimpsed it.

“What’s so bad about Gloria Delray?” her mother said. She was debating whether or not it was safe to apply the next coat of polish.

“She thinks she’s so great,” Claire said.

“Is she?”

Claire glared at her mother.

“Is she great?” her mother asked.

“Well, she’s a good cheerleader,” Claire said, reluctantly.

“So are you,” her mother said, pointing a perfect finger at her.

“Not as good as her,” Claire admitted.

“Then work harder at it. Practice more.”

“How did you know you loved Daddy?” Claire asked as her mother took her hand in her own soft one and carefully applied the final coat of polish to each of her short square nails.

This time her mother didn’t hide her smile. “He walked in that dance and I saw him and I thought
That is the man I’m going to marry
.”

Claire sighed in frustration.

“But how could you know that?” she asked.

“Don’t wiggle,” her mother said. She seemed to be considering Claire’s question carefully. “He had confidence. Broad shoulders and a certain way of entering a room that told me he would be a good husband. A man who would get things done. Take care of things.”

Claire watched the lovely top of her mother’s ash blonde hair as she slowly moved the brush from bottle to nail.

“This was before the world went crazy, of course,” her mother said finally. “The stock market hadn’t crashed. People hadn’t lost all their money. Banks hadn’t closed.” She shook her head, remembering. “People were . . . I don’t know . . . hopeful. Black Friday and the war took away all that hope, I’m afraid.”

“You knew you loved him because you felt hopeful?” Claire persisted.

Her mother laughed. “Maybe. Yes. Back then, you could take a look at a man and believe the two of you were going to fall in love and live happily ever after.”

“I feel hopeful,” Claire said even though she wasn’t sure she did feel hopeful. Or even understand what her mother was talking about.

Her mother kissed the palm of Claire’s hand.

“That’s good, sweetheart. Don’t ever lose that. Love goes out the window when there’s no money, you know. A woman has to stay strong. Men aren’t really very strong at all.”

“They aren’t?” Claire said. She thought about Danny Jones, the quarterback who went out with Gloria Delray, the boy every girl including Claire longed to have notice her. Danny Jones looked very strong. Once, Claire had seen him pick Gloria up by the waist as if she were weightless.

“At the first sign of trouble, a man falls apart. That’s why women have to work so hard to stay optimistic and upbeat, to be frugal and understanding. To not question everything,” her mother added.

Later, when her mother came in to kiss her good night, Claire asked her if love felt like ginger ale bubbles.

“What you want,” her mother said, “is someone who can take care of you. A man who can provide for you and your children. Someone steady. Someone predictable. If you want to feel ginger ale bubbles, Claire, drink a glass of ginger ale.”

All of that, the cooking together and watching the fireflies and talking about love, happened a year or so before her mother died, when Claire first got breasts, when boys started to notice her. In the time that had passed since those afternoons at the kitchen table, painting their nails or playing Crazy Eights or making Waldorf salad—Claire carefully mixing the apples and nuts her mother had chopped into the mayonnaise and sour cream—Claire wondered what advice her mother would give her now. Would she have said Claire should marry Peter, a good provider, a man who was indeed steady but who could not show warmth or share intimacies? What would she think of Claire now, pregnant with someone else’s baby? Living in shame every time her husband even glanced at her?
Fuck me,
Claire used to whisper to Miles. Hadn’t her mother told her that a woman never swears in front of a man? She could still hear her mother saying “H-E-double hockey sticks!” when her cake came out of the oven too dry or her gravy lumped up.
Fuck me,
Claire would beg him.

Sometimes, driving home from meeting Miles, her thighs sticky and her skin flushed pink, Claire got a clear picture of her mother, as clear as if she had seen her just yesterday: wearing a soft green dress cinched at the waist with a yellow ruffled apron over it and beige high-heeled pumps, bent over the oven, her back straight, a dish towel she had knit herself, off-white with even red stripes, in her hands, as she pulled out a cake pan. She touched the top of the cake with her fingertip, able to tell its doneness by the way it sprang back. “H-E-double hockey sticks,” she said, her voice so full of disappointment that Claire’s heart broke remembering. “It’s only a cake,” Claire’s father told her. Her mother looked at him, “George,” she said, “It’s not just a cake. This is what I do.”

Standing at the nurses’ station in that hospital where her mother-in-law lay dying down the hall, Claire’s mind raced with these memories, strange fragments she thought she had forgotten. She thought of Gloria Delray, who had gone to college, to the University of Indiana in Bloomington.

“What are you studying there?” Claire had asked her that first winter after they’d graduated from high school and Gloria had come home for the holidays. The two girls ran into each other at the five-and-dime on a cold afternoon just before Christmas. Outside the wind howled. The sky was gray with snow-filled clouds. Gloria had her long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and she wore a red and white University of Indiana jacket over a red turtleneck and dark blue dungarees. She smiled at Claire as if Claire didn’t know anything about anything.

“I’m going to get my MRS,” Gloria said in the same sure way she used to order a crowd of hundreds to give her a W.

At first, Claire didn’t understand what Gloria meant. By the time she did, Gloria was already heading toward the door, clutching her bag of last-minute presents: a bottle of Jean Naté and a tin of cherry pipe tobacco and a matchbox car.

“Oh!” Claire said, thinking that Gloria was clever. “Your MRS! But what about Danny?”

Gloria laughed. “Danny isn’t going anywhere, Claire.”

If her mother had been alive that day, Claire would have asked her what she thought about that. Danny Jones was working in his family’s supermarket. He would be a good provider, Claire thought. Her father had some saying about how the cobbler’s son always had shoes. Danny’s children would always have food, wouldn’t they? Where exactly did Gloria want to go with her MRS?

“Are you lost?” an orderly pushing a mop asked Claire.

Yes,
Claire wanted to say, but she shook her head and thanked him.

Slowly she made her way back to Birdy’s room where nothing had changed. The old woman lay in the bed, unmoving. Peter was gone, probably getting more coffee. The room seemed vacant, even though someone was in it.

Claire went to the window and adjusted the blinds, letting in the early morning sun. She paused to admire the way the ice-covered branches glistened.

When she turned back around, she was surprised to see her mother-in-law’s eyes open.

Claire smiled at her, but the old woman’s face was crossed with confusion.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Claire. I’m Claire.” Claire wondered if she should go and get someone, a nurse or even the doctor.

The old woman stared at her hard. Then her face softened and she shook her head sadly. “I thought you were someone else,” she said, and closed her eyes.

“No,” Claire said.

She waited, but her mother-in-law did not speak or open her eyes again.

When Peter came in, he stopped as soon as he saw the look on Claire’s face.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Your mother,” Claire said. “She talked to me.”

His eyes shifted from Claire’s face to his mother’s. “Claire,” he said as if he were speaking to Kathy.

“She opened her eyes and asked who I was and when I told her she got disappointed and said she thought I was someone else. Then she went back to sleep.”

“She knows you,” Peter said. “Don’t be silly.”

Claire didn’t respond. The man is always right, even when he’s wrong. Wasn’t that what her mother had told her?

“I’m feeling quite irritable,” Claire said.

“Are you feeling sick again?”

“Irritable,” Claire said gruffly.

“I believe you,” Peter chuckled.

They stared at his mother, Claire half expecting her eyes to fly open and for her to say something else. But she didn’t. The big hand on the clock moved noisily into place.

“I should have brought my knitting,” Claire said, although she didn’t really want to tackle that difficult sweater.

“Why don’t you go back to the house and get it?” Peter said.

The idea of getting fresh air, of being free of all this and driving through the snowy city suddenly seemed like exactly what she needed.

“Would you mind?”

Peter dropped into one of the hard chairs and picked up the
Globe
. “No need for you to be bored to tears,” he said.