The Removers: A Memoir (11 page)

June 2000. I have a car, a girlfriend, I’ve been making a good salary at the crematory for a whole year. Moving to my own apartment seems likely soon. I’m feeling like maybe this is what a normal twenty-four-year-old feels like. Things with
my dad are better than in a long time. We’d spent a year and a half working the same job, and that seemed to let a little air into our relationship. If I’d just met him on the job, he would’ve been my favorite guy to work with. He always volunteered to take the heavier end, which most guys didn’t do when they worked with a kid. He was versatile and generous in conversation. He could talk about sports or movies or the news. He let other people talk. It was nice to be with him as a likable acquaintance, not the guy who had crushed my mother.

In mid-June, Mom and her siblings throw a big party at a Knights of Columbus hall for their parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary. I bring Janie as my date. Someone’s hired a swing band made up of sickly-looking eightysomethings fronted by a porky old chanteuse in a Mae West wig. Good for me to be among the living elderly! A banquet of liver spots, walkers, cataract sunglasses, girdles. The marriage in my nose of liniment and floral perfumes and hot roast beef. I see couples in their eighties attempt a jitterbug. At work I see only people on the losing end of their eighties. I see hundreds of old women a year that for me become one Mildred. Mildred dies in bed with her wedding portrait hanging in sight. Mildred’s been a widow for twenty-five years. Mildred’s at peace now, her daughter tells us, reunited with her Jack. Mildred and Jack. And now I’m in a hall watching a dozen Mildreds and Jacks spin around the linoleum to “Moonlight Serenade.” Mildred and Jack smiling at my parents, who have been asked to pose together for a photo.
Mildred and Jack forever.

The next morning is Father’s Day. Theresa and I go downstairs to the kitchen together because we have gifts for Dad—cigars, a book about Ireland’s horses. Mom’s not home. Dad’s sitting there waiting for us. His eyes are red.

“Where’s Mom?” I say.

He says, “We need to talk.” We haven’t had a family talk since he told us he was fired. “Your mother and I, we haven’t gotten along for a long time. We had a talk this morning.” This makes two talks for him in one day, a Meredith record. “We decided it’s best that I move out.”

All the evidence of the last ten years has shown that our parents have stayed together only out of some arcane Catholic obligation, or maybe because they’re each too broke to live alone and raise kids. All four of us have known that whenever the two of them can live separately our relief will be spectacular. So why is the news so upsetting? Theresa and Dad go into the same hug they’d made ten years before. I don’t get up this time. I sit. What a fool I am for feeling shocked. There’s a sense, I think, that we have spent many years and much psychic energy holding together what had once been a solid family. For them to split up may be the healthiest move, but it’s also the moment when all four of us will have to accept our failure. Mom and Dad admit their twenty-eight years of marriage will end. Theresa and I admit the folly of our hang
ing around the house into our twenties, acting as fingers in the dike, wallowing in depression and weird jobs, and now we’ll finally have to face life outside the shelter and privacy of our parents’ home.

I call Janie at her job as a hostess at a restaurant, and I call Gazz. The three of us meet in Society Hill at the end of Janie’s shift and walk around downtown. They just let me talk. I feel beaten up, weak and tight and sore and nauseous.

I go back to the house later in the afternoon. Mom still isn’t there. When she gets in she starts crying. She hugs me and says, “We stayed together for you.”

Years later my mother will tell me that the day before that Father’s Day in 2000 when Dad told us he was leaving, just a few minutes before we left the house for my grandparents’ anniversary party, she answered a call on our kitchen phone from a stranger who didn’t identify himself. He asked for Mrs. Meredith.

This is she, Mom said.

I’m calling to tell you your husband is sleeping with my wife.

I spent most of the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school indoors wearing a leg cast that came up nearly to my crotch. Lucas was one of the only friends who came over to visit, the only one who stayed for hours. One afternoon the two of us sat in the living room screening the John Candy vehicle
Uncle Buck
. He signed my cast. He had been the goalie the last few years I played soccer, and his mom
and my dad had gone to grade school together. I thought he was the funniest kid on the team.

Just a few weeks before I broke the leg, six months before my dad was fired, Lucas and our friend Joey and I were playing basketball in our regular spot, a driveway behind a row of houses on Overington Street. Maybe a hundred yards away, traffic went by on Large Street, which ran perpendicular to the driveway. That block of Large had no homes on it, just an empty factory, a retired train trestle, the field where we played soccer, and an empty gravel lot. Cars flew along this stretch because there were rarely any parked cars and not many people on foot except during soccer games.

That day, while we played ball, we heard a car racing down Large. We saw it come up from behind and then cut off a car traveling at a normal speed, so that both came to violent stops. The driver of the attacking car got out. He was maybe eighteen. He started yelling, “Why’d you cut me off? Get the fuck out of the car!” The other driver was forty-five or fifty, heavy, bald. He got out. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought he could calm the kid. Maybe he had a son that age at home. “Come on, I didn’t cut you off,” he said.

“You cut me off.”

“We both had a stop sign.”

“You fucking cut me off!”

The older guy tried to get back in his car. The kid surprised him, grabbed the front of his jacket and spun him down to the curb. The kid hustled to his car and opened the passenger door, pulled out a crowbar. As the kid approached, the older guy raised
his open hands and said, “Please.” The kid—I remember long, dirty blond hair and a white baseball cap worn backward—slammed the bar across the man’s upper arm. The kid pivoted and brought the bar back down across the other arm. The man fell and slumped to his side; he couldn’t completely manage curling into a ball, and the kid unloaded strike after strike. As the kid tired out, the gaps between hits got longer and the guy was crying, “No. Please.” I don’t know what made the kid stop. Maybe his arms were too tired, maybe a car driving by on Arrott, out of our sight, spooked him. But after about twenty blows he trotted back to his car and peeled away.

A neighbor on the block, the guy who let us play at his hoop, a man whose name I forget but whose hawk nose and modest mullet perfectly suggested the golfer Greg Norman, was standing with us now. He had heard the yelling and come out his back door. He walked down the driveway to the victim. This is how the memory ends, with Greg Norman approaching this middle-aged man who’s crying on his back on the curb of that barren block, trying with broken arms to clutch himself, while I’m standing a hundred yards away with my friends, cradling a basketball. In this way, as much as through the good times, I have always been tied to Lucas. We’d witnessed something awful together, one failure of civilization that must have burrowed as deeply into his psyche as into mine, one incident that as much as any other signaled the dying of our neighborhood.

I don’t know how it would have gone with Janie if things with
my parents had been different. That summer of 2000 she asked me if I would think about moving to Brooklyn with her while she did grad school. I thought about it, but I couldn’t see how I’d get a job that paid as well as the crematory. This was what I told myself and her. The truth, of course, was bigger. I didn’t want to make that commitment at that age. I was as old as my father had been when he got married, and Janie the same as my mother, and for everyone else I knew, moving in with someone in your early twenties meant a lifetime hitch. And because I was scared of leaving Philadelphia.

Janie moved to New York in August, and I visited a few times. At the end of September she dumped me. I found out later that in that first month of school she’d started seeing a guy in her class. It seems obvious now. Of all the people I’ve known who’ve moved away for graduate school, I can’t think of any who stayed with the boyfriend or girlfriend back home. But I hadn’t met any of them yet then. And I couldn’t see that really I’d been the one to break us up, that we’d been done from the day I told her I was staying put.

My normal day at the crematory looked like this: I’d get in at 11:00 and hit the road. I’d drive to pick up two or three bodies in the first hour and bring them back so Omar would have them there to burn. Then I’d go deliver the cremated remains that were due back and pick up the rest of the day’s dead. While I was out I’d often get a call from Omar or Dave saying there was a new call on, could I swing by this or that funeral
home and do the pickup on my way back? I was just like any other deliveryman, except I carried human cargo.

My favorite drives were out in Chester County, past horse farms with split-rail fences. I always thought of Mickey Rourke in
Diner
, a city kid driving through horse country, pulling over to chat up a beautiful blond equestrian. I never saw any stunners on horseback, but the rolling hills, trees, grass—the overwhelming windows-down bliss of it—would do something to me. It was like the beginning of
Moby-Dick
, the part about how all men crave being near water and can’t explain why. Often those green drives would be the best part of my week.

Without a cassette deck in the van, most of the day I’d listen to sports talk or a station that played soft rock, my nostalgia growing every year for the radio hits of the childhood breakfast table, songs like “Sister Golden Hair” and “Doctor My Eyes.”

And then somehow you find yourself naked in a Victorian house in the suburbs meatus to meatus with a manicurist you met in a bar while her parents—who don’t much speak to each other; your initial conversational spark—attempt to soothe themselves to sleep in the next room with a machine that makes ocean sounds. The manicurist is ample, flirty, smart. She’s made a studio of her parents’ attic, where she uses the techniques of realism to paint movie aliens and human-size gerbils. Her little overbite, the smell of her neck like the sweetest taste of pork chop and apple sauce, the shine of her black
bob—it feels like Godard or Yahweh Himself cast her in your life. Her ass in jeans alone takes months off your expected date of death. And all of it adds up to such a void of feelings for her that you suspect something’s wrong.

And on the nights you don’t see the manicurist you’re dating a kindergarten teacher, but every time she gets undressed, maybe it’s because she’s blond, you see Janie’s head on her body and you excuse yourself to the bathroom and splash cold water on your face.

And then you’re out with the manicurist again at a bar downtown and on the way out of the place you see Lucas. You haven’t seen him since you bought the Saab a year ago. He rolls through the intersection in an old gray, tinted-out Pontiac with his window rolled all the way down. His eyes are dark, heavy, dull. You focus on each other, but neither of you raises a hand or even nods. A dark omen, you think, this pair of boys becoming men incapable of the most meager goodwill.

Another night the manicurist’s sister and six-year-old niece do homework at their kitchen table and the manicurist pushes you down on the couch in the living room, maybe ten feet from the mother and daughter and just out of sight around the corner. You lie there still, wide-eyed at her bravado. She puts you inside her and loses herself in the ride, head back, eyes closed. She is both rider and bull. You’re the ground, boy.

Wilbur and Gazz pick me up at the crematory for a Sixers game. I just have to reposition a body before I leave, make sure there
are no parts left outside the range of the cremation burner’s direct flame. They’ve never been here before. I ask if they want to watch.

“Dude. Yes,” Wilbur says.

Gazz isn’t interested. He stays off to the side.

Wilbur crouches like a catcher to see into the four-inch gap made by raising the door. With the long hoe I crumble the skull, giving the flame access to the brain. To position the leg bones under the burner, I extend the hoe out and slide it back along the oven floor like a croupier stick. As we’re walking out to the car, Wilbur, in the same tone he’d have used to alert me to a pile of dog shit still fifteen feet in front of us, says, “There’s no way this job won’t mess you up down the road.”

For years I’ve called that period of eleven years when my parents lived together without talking “the silence.” They talked, though. They navigated the topics of acquaintances sharing a house: repairs, bills, can you pick me up at the mechanic’s, pass the butter. But joy had gone. Dad could laugh when Mom was around, but his laughter made her quiet. Mom would laugh sometimes, but not when Dad was home.

Part of what they gave us in these years was a sense of careening, of drift, the notion that things aren’t going well but change isn’t within our power. I stayed in the funeral business almost exactly as long as they stayed together without sharing a laugh.

Summer of 2001 I went and visited Janie at her parents’ house, a few blocks from Oakland Street. She was home from New York for a few days. I walked over building myself up, hoping that when she saw me, when we talked, she’d want to get back together on the spot. I remember such a response in my body—cold and twitchy—the closer I got to her house. When I got there she was in the living room. I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. Lips, teeth, eyes, skin, hair—all her goldenness both standing for itself and suggesting all beauty, all of it seeming to vibrate like a Terrence Malick wheat field at sunset with the insects miked. I hated my brain for registering her allure more now than at any time in the last year we were together. Her sisters were there, too, and her mom and her sister’s baby. We made small talk. She never suggested that we should go somewhere private. We just stayed in the living room as two members of the larger group. I was the visitor. I left after half an hour. When I did, she gave me the kind of hug you give an old aunt. She thanked me for coming. You only thank people for coming, I realized that day, when you want them to leave.