The Year We Left Home (14 page)

“You sure you’re not working too hard, studying too hard? You look like you’re dropping some weight.”

“Basketball season. Coach always runs us ragged. Have a great weekend, Mr. Milano.”

Dorkydorkydorkydorky.

Michelle was waiting for her at her locker. “Where you been?”

“I had to go talk to Super Pants.” Torrie banged her locker open, reshuffled her books, and reached for her jacket. “Do you think he dates?”

“Oh yeah. Big dating action for the Pants.”

“Maybe we could fix him up.”

“With a nice hairy orangutan.”

“Boy or girl orangutan?”

They laughed and the sound of it echoed through the long empty corridor, dark at the end of a rainy afternoon.

Outside they sprinted through the drilling rain to Torrie’s car and flung themselves inside. Torrie found a towel in the backseat and they used it to mop their faces and their streaming hair.

“Sucky weather.”

“Perfect for funerals.”

“Oh hey, Tor? Is it OK if I just come to the wake? Joey’s only going to be in town the one night.”

“God, yes. The service is all the way up in Hardy. I don’t think anybody’s gonna come.” Torrie meant, anyone from school. There would be about three busloads of family.

She dropped Michelle off at her house and went on home. Anita’s car was in the drive. This day was just getting better and better.

“Hi Mom. Hi Nita. Hi Marmaduke.”

“No-o!” Her nephew rushed at her, pounding at her knees.

“Percival? Barnaby? Chuck?”

He kept insisting that his name was Matthew, Matthew, and Torrie swept him up and said Well what do you know, it was Matthew, she just hadn’t recognized him. Anita and her mother looked at her, unsmiling. “What?”

“We were talking about Martha,” her mother said. She made it sound like everything was Torrie’s fault.

“Oh. Sure.”

Anita looked her over. “You’re changing clothes, right?”

“Matthew! Can I wear your shirt?”

“No!”

“How about your pants?”

Howls of protest and giggles. “Guess I’ll just have to wear my old jeans, then.”

“Torrie,” her mother said wearily.

Lighten up.
Torrie looked in the refrigerator and selected a Diet Sprite. “When’s Ryan coming?”

“Whenever he gets here. Are you hungry, sweetie? I’m making chili and everybody can serve themselves.”

“I had an egg-salad sandwich a little while back, so I’m OK.” Anita was really getting porky. Her slacks were so tight across her thighs that the zipper pulled and gapped. She’d skinned her hair back in a French-twisty arrangement that made her look about forty years old. Her boobs were huge. They bounced and flopped around in a totally gross fashion. Sometimes just thinking about bodies, other people’s bodies, was enough to make her sick to her stomach.

Anita saw her staring. “What?”

“Just admiring your hair.”

“Thank you.” Still suspicious. Anita told Matthew that no, he couldn’t play with Aunt Torrie, he had to get changed into his good clothes. Poor kid. He was always having to do something Anita thought was important.

In her room, Torrie unpacked her books and put each one in its spot on the desk on its own different-colored folder. She took off her wet clothes and put on sweats.
Blood on the Tracks
was already on the turntable and she switched it on, volume low so nobody in the kitchen would give her a hard time for being disrespectful. Not that Torrie saw it that way. She hoped they’d play Bob songs at her funeral.

She sang along just under her breath. Bob was so much better than the lame shit passing for music these days. The Bee Gees. Please. She’d missed out on so much, been too young for all the beautiful craziness and being a part of things that really mattered and anyway in Iowa it was as if none of it had ever happened.

She knew it was stupid, but she had a little fantasy about meeting Bob. Back in the old days, before he got all weird and Christian.

She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns / “Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”
Sometimes she pretended the songs were about her. It would be raining hard, just as now, and she’d have her own house, not here but somewhere else, the rooms full of velvet pillows and candles. She’d hear a knock at the door and there would be Bob. From here you couldn’t force the fantasy to go any further, because it was never clear just what the girls in the songs did that made them so desirable. You weren’t supposed to talk much, that seemed clear. You were just this soulful, totally cool being, instantly recognizable to other soulful and cool beings.

Another voice from the kitchen. Ryan had arrived.

He was standing with his back to her and she snuck up behind him and tickled him in the ribs. He must have heard her coming because he reached around and hauled her around by her arm. She wriggled loose and grinned at him. “Hey big shot.”

“Hey small fry.” The only time Torrie ever felt short was around her brothers.

“You look like a total hippie burnout,” she said. His hair was in a ponytail and he wore a denim shirt under his corduroy sports jacket.

“Thank you.”

Their mother said, “Please tell me you brought some other clothes.”

He reached into a duffel bag and came up with a red paisley tie, which he looped around his neck and into a knot, then stood back to let them judge the effect.

His mother sighed. “How much can I stand.”

“Relax. I brought a suit for the funeral.”

Anita had a cloth napkin pinned around Matthew’s neck and was feeding him chili. “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove with that hair.”

“I could say the same thing about you.”

Their mother said warningly, “Ryan, you haven’t been in the house five minutes. Why don’t you put your suitcase away and get some chili. Your father and Blake are going to meet us there.”

“When’s Jeff coming?” Torrie asked her sister.

“He can’t make it tonight. He’ll come to the service tomorrow.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

Anita gave her an unfriendly look. It was almost unfair to make fun of her. She didn’t have anything like a sense of humor she could use to fight back.

Their mother was putting out the bowls and spoons and crackers for chili. “Here,” she said, handing Torrie a bowl. “You need to eat something. I made a vegetarian batch just for you.”

Torrie filled the bowl halfway and ate a few spoonfuls. It tasted greasy, and the smell of it clogged her head. “I need to get dressed,” she said, taking the bowl back to her room.

She found a white shirt and a pair of dark pants, added a gray sweater and low-heeled boots. She brushed her hair, scraped the chili into a plastic bag from the drugstore, twisted it shut, put it into
the pocket of an old coat, and carried the empty bowl back into the kitchen. “OK, I’m ready.”

She rode with Ryan to the funeral home, leaving her mother and Anita and Matthew to follow. Torrie and Ryan usually wound up together because everybody else in the family was so terminally uncool. “We’re taking the long way there,” Ryan announced, lighting a joint and getting busy with it.

“You are nuts,” Torrie said. It was not yet dark and enough dinnertime traffic was on the road so that cars passed them on almost every block. “You want to get me thrown off the team? No, I don’t want any. Besides, pot gives me the stoned munchies.”

“Can’t have that.” He opened his window a crack and blew the smoke outside. The rain had diminished into drizzle and fog, the sky softening into a thick gray veil.

“You are something else,” Torrie said, turning her face to the window to watch the uninspiring view of Grenada. Streetlights reflected on the wet pavement. The little houses looked lonesome in their big yards. It was impossible to imagine one interesting thing going on inside any of them. If they were the only shelter from the storm, Bob would stay out in the rain.

Ryan had put the joint out and was driving even slower now. She said, “Tell me you don’t cruise around Chicago blowing dope.”

“Not usually. Traffic’s too heavy.”

“It’s messed up that you’re a teacher.” He was getting his master’s degree and taught discussion sections of the big poli-sci lecture.

“If you’re lucky, you’ll have a teacher as cool as me in college.”

“Yeah, can’t wait.” She only made it sound sarcastic. She felt a wave of longing for the life she hadn’t started yet. School was the quickest way out of here.

“Sad about Aunt Martha.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Kind of the last of the old-timers.”

Torrie didn’t say anything. She guessed that somebody had to be the last.

“Look, Mom wanted me to talk to you. About this not-eating thing.”

“She really, really does not have enough to do these days.”

“Yeah. But she’s worried about you. Me too. Your legs look like two sticks rubbed together.”

“Gee, thanks.”

He sighed. “Scratch that last part.”

“I am not too thin. That’s just her. God, could she just get off my case? Does her whole life have to be about stuffing people with food? What did she do, call you in Chicago? You guys were talking about me?” The minute Torrie said it, she knew she was right. They’d been having whole conversations behind her back.

“She worries, OK?”

“Just because I don’t want to eat dead cows and pigs, it’s some big deal.”

“This isn’t about being a vegetarian.”

“Isn’t it? You know what she’s like. It’s just too weird for her. If you don’t eat three helpings of glop at every meal—”

“Not everything is glop.”

“What am I supposed to do, whip out a milk shake and scarf it down? Would that make you happy? Huh?”

“Never mind. Forget I said anything. You should do whatever you want.”

Without her realizing it, they’d reached the funeral home. The parking lot was in back and cars were already lined up, people hurrying inside through the early darkness. She was probably related to most of them. It wasn’t a thought she liked having.

“Look,” she said, talking fast because she didn’t want him mad at her for some completely stupid reason her mother had come up with. “I’m sorry I’m being kind of a brat, but you don’t know what it’s like being stuck there with her picking on you constantly because nobody else is around. She never does anything anymore. Ask Dad. She watches TV and knits stuff nobody wants to wear and cooks stuff nobody wants to eat. She’s the one everybody should be worried about.”

“I do worry about her.” He was occupied with finding a parking space. He seemed to be done with talking.

“Come on, Ry. Give me a break. I’m never going to do anything right, far as she’s concerned. Dad too.”

“Why’s that?” He pulled into a space but let the engine idle. His arms were draped over the steering wheel. He didn’t have to get stoned. It was stupid.

“Because I’m not Anita.”

She was afraid he’d laugh, and he did. “Whoa! Good thing too. What?”

“Nothing.”

“What? Come on. Why’s it so tragic you’re not Anita?”

“Because I’m not gonna hang around here my whole life and pop out grandkids and I don’t think the world ends at the state borders and I don’t live and breathe the gospel according to Martin Luther.”

“Well I’m not that way either. But there’s times I kind of wish I was. Come on, we need to get inside.”

Half the town was there. The country relatives made up for the other half. They had to squeeze through a hallway packed with people shedding their damp coats, milling around, gabbing. Ryan saw some guy he’d gone to school with and stopped to talk to him. Torrie pushed ahead, looking for Michelle.

In the viewing room, flowers in clumps or sprays were arranged on pedestals. It was probably more florists’ flowers than Aunt Martha had ever seen in her lifetime. The coffin was up front on a little stage. Torrie gave it a quick, horrified look. Martha, or what used to be Martha, was propped up with her hands folded across her chest. They’d left her eyeglasses on and dressed her in the same gray print dress she’d worn at Norm’s funeral.

Almost the worst part of being dead was thinking about what people would do to your body. And there wouldn’t be one thing you could do about it.

Michelle came up to her then. “Hey. Do you have to go view her?”

Torrie looked around and didn’t see her parents. “I can just say I
did.” They sat down on one of the upholstered sofas in the back. A box of Kleenex sat on the table next to it, but she didn’t see anybody in the room crying.

Michelle nudged her. “Oh. My. God. You brother is like, a hair queen.”

Torrie watched him enter the room trying not to look stoned. He tucked his chin under and clasped his hands behind his back. Like he was really going to blend in. She hated being embarrassed about him. “He’s a dick.”

“Yeah, but he’s cute.”

Here were her parents, and her brother Blake and his skanky girlfriend. The girlfriend wanted to get married in the worst way, and as Torrie’s father liked to say, that was probably the way it was going to happen.

Her mother waved Torrie over. Michelle said it was OK, she was going to go talk to Kurt and Denny. Torrie saw them leaning against a wall across the room. Two of the boring generic boys that everybody thought were so cool. Neither of them could carry on a conversation for more than three minutes. “Go for it,” Torrie said.

“Hey Dad. What’s up, Mom?” They were standing up front near the coffin. Torrie tried to keep her back to it. She thought she smelled the flowers, a cold, waxy perfume.

“Would you go watch Matthew so your sister can pay her respects? She didn’t want to bring him in here.”

“No prob.” Torrie was glad for an excuse to leave. She wondered how old Matthew had to be before he got dragged in to see dead relatives.

“Thanks, sweetheart. Say hello to your Aunt Pat and Uncle Morgan.”

Torrie did so, murmuring that she was sorry about Aunt Martha. Pat was Martha’s oldest. Norm and Martha had been like the nursery rhyme about going to St. Ives, and the man with seven wives, and every wife had seven sacks and every sack had seven cats and so on, well, not the seven wives part, but they’d had a ton of children and all
those children had a ton of children who were now busy making more big, round-headed, humorless Peersons. The world wasn’t going to run short of Peersons anytime soon.