Funerals for Horses (2 page)

Raphael will come by in the morning, I think, and I will be gone. Now that he wears blotches on his forearms, and the rasp clings from his last bout with PCC pneumonia, he diligently insinuates himself into my life. It is a breach of agreement, albeit a silent agreement, and I suppose he feels he must force me to draw his line. He will not bow out with grace as others have done in the past. He will continue to knock, wearing his splotches offset against black jeans and shirt, dark circles, dark haze of beard, dark hair falling into his eyes. Even debilitated, Raphael maintains a Bohemian grace, an odd handsomeness.

His visits will continue until I refuse him or until I am gone, which is to say, there will be one more visit, to no avail. No, I am not hardhearted. I will miss Raphael. More than any of them.

Reverently, I dismantle the shrine-like arrangement of my brother Simon’s photos, a forty-year-old blond child in a business suit.

I picture Raphael watching over my shoulder. If he were here, he’d say, a healthy move, Ella.

I would not tell him I only disturbed the photos because I’ll need them with me on the road, both for solace and as exhibit A.

As I pack, he would say, you’ll never find him.

I would scream at him for that. I would forbid him to ever say I cannot find Simon. I hear the screaming in my head. It sounds like my sister DeeDee, telling me I must never again suggest that Andy is not a real horse. Her hands locked around my throat when she screamed this in real life. I still miss DeeDee.

I am glad Raphael is not here.

In the morning I stick the notes on my door with push pins, a different color for each sweet, doomed man, whichever color I feel suits him best.

I clean out my bank accounts on the way out of town.

THEN:

I was born with the caul. According to Grandma Ginsberg, this signified great things. But it proved a disappointment. Yes, I was the smartest child in all of my classes, the most morbidly mature that any of my teachers had seen, save my sister DeeDee. Yes, I was spiritually advanced, but in my family this was nothing special.

I owe any additional senses, I believe, not to the caul but to the genes of my father, Gabriel Ginsberg, a man with an intimidating I.Q.

We only lived together as a family until I was four, but I hold vivid early memories. Mostly I remember my mother rousing us out of bed in the middle of the night, bundling us in blankets and packing us down to the police station to post my father’s bail. This same scene played out on at least a half dozen separate occasions.

He always looked contrite, though still in good humor. He would try to kiss my mother on the cheek, but she would pull away.

She adored the man, needed him, and always assured the police she would keep him on a tighter leash. This was the only time their roles shifted, the only time he needed her, which I now suspect is why she never shortened his leash.

At the trials my mother pleaded with the judge not to jail him, claiming the family would starve. Despite the recurring nature of his offenses, the judge would always let him off with a fine, though a higher fine each time, and threaten prison the next time my father appeared before his bench.

I know all this because, although Simon was in school, my mother would pack DeeDee and me to court for lack of a babysitter. Grandma Ginsberg claimed failing health, especially in the wake of one of my father’s arrests. I overheard her tell my mother that it didn’t matter anyway, because we were entirely too young to understand a term like indecent exposure. She didn’t realize that children file away such words, awaiting definition.

I’d sit enthralled on the car ride home, loving the back of my father’s head. The thinning hair on top created a wild effect that no amount of Brylcreem could tame. It seemed to match the rest of the man: big, rangy, loosely strung and indistinct.

Until my father left, he took us every Sunday to visit Grandma Ginsberg, the one who put such stock in my caul.

She always watched Picka Polka on Sundays. I was keenly aware of missing Deputy Dawg, but had no authority to change channels.

Grandma Ginsberg pinched cheeks.

If there is something good I can say for the woman, and no doubt I am scratching, it’s that she loved her family. Still, it was a draining, disturbing sort of love, a leeching of our life force. I tried to stand away as much as possible, which prompted the often-repeated invitation to shame, “You don’t love your old grandma.”

Once, my father chastised me in the car on the way home because he said I didn’t act like I wanted to be there. I didn’t want to be there. Nobody had warned me that I was supposed to act.

When my father left home, Grandma Ginsberg went down and never got up. She broke her hip within twenty-four hours of the news. My mother bundled us into the car and met the ambulance at City General, where I listened to Grandma’s keening shrieks of pain and her self-aggrandizement, and stared at her translucent gray face in wide-eyed silence.

She came to our house to recover, but apparently recovery was not in her plans. She refused wheelchair, walker, crutches. She refused to sit up again. She refused even to lift her huge, uncooperative body onto her own bedpan, forcing my mother to lift her, to feed her, to administer her pills, to listen to her kvetching, to jump out of sleep to calm her unreasonable fears.

This my mother would do for the kin of a man who abandoned her. Much as I loathed Grandma Ginsberg, I used to openly hope for her longevity, assuming that my mother would die without the constant, unyielding torment.

Grandma Ginsberg lived in a dank, smelly back bedroom which children avoided as if by precognition, even neighbor children who didn’t know her. Later, after the sports sections began stacking up, we never invited neighbor children anyway.

When my father left, my mother began to pull the sports section out of the evening paper before bundling the leftovers for the Boy Scout paper drive. Nobody dared ask why until almost two years later, when the papers had been assigned their own closet, then spilled beyond it.

Simon had the guts, not me. Brave, honest Simon, twelve years old to my six, asked if he could throw them away.

“Certainly not,” she said. “Your father will be home any day now, and the first thing he’ll want is dinner and his sports section.”

She swirled out of the room as if in a hurry, leaving me alone with my brother Simon, who twisted a finger around near his head as a comment on her mental acuity. I was shocked and impressed. How can a child admit a parent is unstable? To me it seemed equivalent to suggesting that the ground won’t hold us up, or gravity won’t stick us down to it. But Simon worked off a different set of laws. Simon stepped on cracks. Simon was never afraid to see.

I often thought it was Simon, not me, who should have been born with the caul.

In these early years, when I still assumed god placed us somewhere on his long agenda, I wondered if he had simply forgotten it when Simon was born, then sent it along with me as an afterthought, thinking it would at least arrive into the right family. Most say god never makes mistakes, but I was a reasonable child, able to accept that even as his powers outnumber ours, so must his list of responsibilities and details grow geometrically beyond our scope. I would cut him some slack. But to assume the role of chosen one, in a family with my brother Simon—no, that I could never do.

Simon was the hero. Not just my hero.
The
hero, period. He couldn’t have held his job any more decisively if he’d been born with the word tattooed on his forehead.

Now my sister DeeDee, she was the actress.

DeeDee’s life fell apart the day Grandma Ginsberg called her a whore and a thief.

Mind you, this was nothing special.

Pushing into the depths of that back bedroom, you could be her loving grandchild, a wild Indian headhunter, or her whoring bastard ex-husband. Or perhaps the day would yield some new hallucination. Simon always smiled and took it philosophically. I had long since stopped going in.

DeeDee stormed into the kitchen, where Simon and I sat at the table brushing sand paintings with salt we’d emptied from the shaker, her face red and hot with indignation, tears sliding through her toughest guard.

Simon grabbed her in a bear hug, and motioned me to come quickly, and we sandwiched her between us until the hitching of her sobs replaced trembling rage. I felt the trembling, the hitch, and wondered why I couldn’t feel pain and rage, as I appeared to be a sentient human, with nerve endings and everything.

DeeDee,” he said, “you know she always does this. Remember when she called me goyim and slammed my hand in the door? That was way back when she was herself.”

“I just can’t stand it,” DeeDee said, barely audible. “One grand-mother who hates me, fine—but not two for two.”

He took her by the hand and we led her into my mother’s room, where Mom lay half-sleeping, though it was after four. Simon explained that Grandma Ginsberg had called DeeDee a whore and a thief. He knew and I knew that she did these things regularly, but for DeeDee’s sake, I assumed, he filed an official report.

Our mother raised her head.

“Simon, did you get ground beef for dinner? Run to the store right now, dear.”

“Mom,” he repeated, “DeeDee is very upset.”

“Make him grind it right in front of you. Don’t get what’s already ground. God only knows what they put into that.”

Blood rose into DeeDee’s face again. “You don’t listen, you crazy old lady,” she screamed too close to my left eardrum.

“And hurry back from the store, dear—I’ll get up and start dinner.”

But she didn’t move.

As Simon sprinted to the market clutching the dollar bill he had pulled from the grocery fund, DeeDee opened each of the kitchen cabinets, stood on a step stool, and hooked her arm behind every stack of dishes and glasses, pulling them out into gravity, and their appointment with the linoleum. When our mother appeared to start dinner, her slippered feet skidded around in the debris. I closed my eyes and pictured a beach scattered with a thousand clam shells, or a wind chime tinkling on the porch.

But a minute later, as she stood staring into the empty cabinets, the shards crunching under her weight, I imagined the sound my shattering teeth might make if I ever clenched them as hard as I really wanted.

After a few minutes’ surveillance, and after Simon had returned, puffing from exertion, she turned back to him and asked if he’d remembered paper plates.

DeeDee would have screamed if in Simon’s place. I would have groused that she’d requested no such thing. Simon simply pulled another dollar from the fund and took off running as my mother dropped the ground beef into an overheated pan with a startling sizzle.

No one thought about paper cups, and we had to take occasional trips from the table to the sink, to drink water from the faucet. We walked carefully to avoid slipping in the shifting sea of glass and china fragments.

Three days later I came home from school to find a box full of the stuff at the curb. I felt a great relief, knowing that my mother had noticed, even acknowledged, a situation requiring attention. The pleasure faded as my brother Simon pushed through the kitchen door with the second box. As I hung up my coat, he put the broom and dustpan away without comment.

“Simon, we don’t have two grandmothers, do we?”

“Of course,” he said. “Everybody has two grandmothers.”

I knew there had been such a thing as a Grandma Sterling, but owing to the fact that I’d never seen her, I pictured her dead.

I asked why Grandma Sterling was never around, though it seemed like asking for trouble. If Grandma Ginsberg went away, I’d be smart enough not to inquire after her.

“Her choice,” he said with a shrug, and then he whispered, “I don’t think she likes us.”

And what was my role in all of this? I had none. They’d all been taken. My job was not to exist at all. Though too much alive to play it to perfection, I feel I performed a fairly adept imitation.

On the drive to Sacramento, I question myself in an endless, hamster-wheel pattern as to whether Sarah thinks of herself as my brother’s widow. Of course, I will not ask. Because if she does, I could no longer be kind to Sarah, and above all I need to be kind.

I arrive at the house late, too late, really. I can see I’ve awakened her. Her hair, fine and blond like his, flies in many directions, most leading across her face. Her fair skin seems lined and dough-like, the way his did upon waking. With my dark, Semitic looks, I’m sure an outsider would guess me as the wife, her as the sister. I suppose I’d switch with her if the world would allow.

She’s glad to see me.

“Ella,” she says. “Baby.”

She’s never called me baby before, but she’s sleepy, a sort of inexpensive truth serum. And we are bound by a common love, a stronger bond now, as it extends to a common loss.

She throws her arms around me and I leech her warmth. It’s not fair, really. It’s a trick I learned from Grandma Ginsberg, to draw strength from an embrace without returning any. But I know Sarah will be warm in her house while I’m away, walking off the edge of a flat earth. I must assume she won’t begrudge me.

She pulls me inside, where I tell her I want a complete lesson on where Simon’s clothes were found.

Of course, I could have gotten that much by phone, but I need so much more. I need a piece of her to take along.

Then, I say, I will take a good night’s sleep and proceed. But I do not take a good night’s sleep.

I lie awake all night, on Simon’s side of the bed, because there is only the one bedroom, thinking that I am no substitute for him, and have no right to be here. The moon is nearly full, and a streak of it slides through his bedroom window, falling across the picture. Across Simon’s soft, full cheeks, the fold of extra flesh under his chin, his sandy blond hair, which falls onto his forehead. He is a Tom Sawyer of a businessman. His mustache curls around at the corners of his smile. It is a twelve-year-old’s smile. It always was. When he was seven, when he was forty.

The only thing my family ever did right was to breed that smile.