Braided Lives (76 page)

I grasp at Howie’s dark arm, let go. We shuffle into a paneled vestibule, lining up to sign a book. Howie straightens his tie before his reflection. When Dad hands me the pen I know what I want to write, Donna Stuart. I make myself write my jagged name.

Mother joins us. “Oh, Malcolm, you didn’t sign! I signed for us all already.”

“You shouldn’t have.” He lowers. “That’s a husband’s duty.”

Mother picks lint off Howie, straightens his straightened tie. “You’ve got on a suit. Good. I wasn’t sure you had one. You look good enough to meet anybody’s relations.” She grips my arm, urging me into line behind her. “Hurry and view her. They’re about to begin. It would have been so embarrassing if the two of you were late, in front of them all. Your aunt Jean is here, she flew in earlier. Shhh!”

The creamy casket shines like a new convertible. Dad halts over her, chewing his lip. Mother’s head ducks and bobs up, lips moving. I slip forward. For an instant I think it isn’t Donna. The face looks like china smashed and carefully glued. The bones have melted into a pudgy smoothness. They have applied makeup heavily over the blue skin. Rouged baby unconvincing on the satin pillow as a bowl of wax fruit.

Mother’s fingers meet in my arm. She is yanking at me. Howie prods me forward, his jaw locked. I let myself be pushed. Did I nod out over the coffin?

Aunt Louella looks thinner, her face drawn toward her nose. She dabs at her pale eyes. Grief rises from her like sweat; I smell it and am put at ease. I take both of her hands while she grasps mine and something real is momentarily exchanged. “Oh, Jill, it’s not right,” she murmurs.

“It’s wrong,” I say in litany. “I won’t forgive.”

“No, all wrong. Don’t ever forgive.”

The line pushes us apart. “They did a beautiful job, Louella,” Aunt Jean says piously. “She looks so peaceful.”

Dad is shaking various hands. They materialize around him, hands to be shaken. Howie stands at his side. I take refuge behind them and manage not to pass on with the line to Peter’s clump. On the wall is a plaque from Thomas A. Fairweather & Sons of Fairweather’s Memorial Chapel to themselves in appreciation, calling attention to air conditioning, a pipe organ, ten public rooms, a fleet of modern vehicles (unspecified: go-carts? fire engines?) and Over a Quarter of a Century of Dignity and Reverence. I nudge Howie. “Reverent for twenty-six years and what do they get? A lot of stiffs.”

His face softens with a suppressed smile. That is the first thing I have said in three days he has been able to relate to.

Mother tugs on my elbow. Peter slumps near the archway. Our eyes meet with a shock of pure hatred. Then he sloughs off my glare, turning away. I want to kill him. Slowly.

“What did you say, Jillie, don’t mumble. Aren’t you going to offer your sympathies to Peter?”

“No.”

“Everybody will notice. Go over. People will think you’re still jealous.”

“Mother, he tried to implicate me with the police.”

“Oh, he did, did he? You stay away from him.” She sits me down firmly. “Just let that no-goodnik try.” She takes Howie over. “This is Jill’s fiance,” I hear her lilting. “He’s in medical school at Columbia. Oh, you’ve met? We’re so very sorry, Peter.” Handshake. Pump, pump. Howie and Peter jaw to jaw.

The organ begins emoting. Aunt Jean leans over the row to me, her weathered-pine face drawn tight. “They brought in an Episcopalian! The Stuarts are all Presbyterians. Except for her mother, who’s a Papist.”

“Donna was a Jew. Like me.” To seize her body and run. Dig a hole in Rouge Park, in the Arboretum with my nails, faithful dog.

Velvet, marble, mahogany pews. The organ farts purple. Gladiolas, carnations, lilies. Peter’s mother is saying to Aunt Louella, “Oh, but I understood your whole family was High Church. Donna led me to believe that….”

I slide over for Howie, wedged between Mother and him. Everyone looks up expectantly out of folded faces. The minister is bald, but for a patch of brown hair that has taken root over each ear, on the protected side slopes of his high slick head. Though his voice has great resonance when he lets the bass boom forth in a phrase of Scripture, for the most part he does not pitch to the back but offers it round urbanely, like a tray of canapes.

We are supposed to follow the service in a red book and we keep being supposed to get up and sit down and kneel. Perhaps twenty people in the room know what is going on. After a while the rest of us are hopelessly lost, asking each other, What page was that? popping up at the wrong times, sitting out a long prayer when we are supposed to kneel. Mother gives me a look of complicity in total incomprehension.

Finally he settles in to preach, using a text from Corinthians. “‘But some man will say, How are the dead raised up: and with what body do they come?’” His voice turns clever and silken. He reminds me of English professors who defend the absolute sanctity of tradition—a tradition of which they may be part but not I and never Donna—by wit, by quotation, by making opposition appear oafish and uncivilized. On his voice the corpse is borne forward hung with dewy ribbons like a Paschal lamb. He alludes to the car crash supposed to have killed her.

Donna was, Donna is not. Just in front of Howie, Donna’s nephew sits next to Estelle. His head, tilted back, moves slowly as if he were reading something written on the archway. Then I see too. From the coping overhead a small brown spider is spinning downward, riding up into an interstice of the carving, then gliding down again. I watch the spider stitching.

Aunt Louella sobs. Uncle Hubie rubs his hands in emotion for which his set of acceptable faces provides no exit. And Peter, he is a finch given an auk’s egg to hatch. He sits on her death flapping his elbows.

“‘The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven,’” the minister quotes. She was of the earth, earthy but not man, of the light, burning, of the wind, fierce, of the water, swift flowing and now spilt. My friend in a whirlwind of words, the friend I failed and love still, uselessly. Sharp ivory doppelganger with a laugh like something breaking: are you already fading a little that I make up phrases to try to hold on to you?

“Howie,” I whisper. “I can’t take this.” His face freezing, he glares at me sideways. His eyes of a changeable sky are grey and cold.

Mother’s hand darts out too slow, scoring my elbow. Then I am out in the aisle. The minister’s full voice knocks once as if a cylinder had missed as I stumble past him. The funeral director looming beside the exit starts toward me, his lips pursing to whisper, but I dodge around him and out the heavy door. On the lowest step I sit and am sick, violently.

“Since you’re evicted, you have to find a place to live anyhow.” Howie scrubs the top of his head with his nails. “Let’s get moving on it. I can get the apartment section of the Sunday
Times
early from my newsdealer.”

“I can’t do it. I can’t look yet.” Head propped against the wall I lie on Alberta’s bed. Something squats on me, cold and heavy incubus. I see you with snow on your fine hair coming flushed from Lennie, hugging yourself, uttering joy in harsh high sea gull cries: a girl six years younger than the woman who died.

“All right, you’re sorry. I’m sorry too. But you aren’t helping by turning yourself into a bag lady.”

“I have to wear her out, don’t you see?”

“You have to wear both of us out. You’re giving yourself to it. You’re enjoying it.” His bulldog jaws are clamped in recoil.

“She’s really dead. I’m knowing that all of the time. I can’t get past it yet.”

“I hear you being sloppy and mystical. Okay, Donna was your cousin—you carry on about how stupid it is that you have to be polite to mine. But she was married to that nebbish Peter. She was his, not yours.”

“She was mine too.”

“In the meantime you abandon me.”

“I know you saw Stephanie yesterday. Her cologne stuck to you. I can’t help it, I have a keen nose.”

“We’re never alone. At my place there’s Steve and Robbie, and you’re holed up with Alberta and a cat.”

I say nothing. Alberta is more tolerant than he is. I am not yet able to start playing house with him.

“Do you think I’m sneaking around to see her? I felt I owed her an explanation. I wanted her to hear about our marriage plans from me. We treated her shoddily.”

Stephanie’s word. “To be sorry means nothing when I’d do it again.”

“I wonder. You have little enough use for me now.”

“Howie, you can’t protect me from mourning.”

“What am I supposed to do, put myself in storage? Climb into a box while you decide you want to pursue some damn experience? When we’re married, you can’t just duck out.” He holds himself around the belly as if he had eaten something poisoned that swells inside. “Jill, all night long I watch the bodies come in, teeth knocked out, heads smashed in, one arm held on by a shirt. We’re meat! You get used to it.”

“Used to it so you don’t feel. For each of them, it’s pain. People aren’t replaceable meat.”

Ever since the funeral he has a way of looking at me when he thinks I am not observing. “You know, Jill, people get brought into the psychiatric unit who aren’t acting any crazier than you are. Yet I keep having the feeling you could stop if you wanted to!”

We are running down a narrow way between Djordjevick’s garage and a scraggly hedge smelling of dog piss, running hard but holding hands. The gate sticks. I pull and pull at it. She is small and her face is dirty. They are close behind, their footsteps pounding, metal clinking. I yank at the gate. Callie hides her face, cowering against the blotched grey wall of the garage. I tug with both hands. The gate bursts open, letting us crowd through to race down the alley and cut across a vacant lot. She grips my hand too hard in flight. They chase us across hillocks of snake grass. We hide in the prickly bushes. They are crashing through the weeds, making the ground drum against our knees. Her heart throbs in her thin throat. A smear of rust or blood rims her pale mouth.
Run for it! Upstairs,
I urge. She runs so slowly I am sure they will catch us, up the back stairs, up to the huge dusty attic. We crouch in the middle of the floor. Afraid of the rats she hides her face in my shoulder. Her nails hurt me. Her tears are cold pebbles.
The rats won’t bite us, Donna,
I promise. Steps encircle the house. I hold her saying,
We’re safe here.
She shivers. I see there are no doors or windows in the attic.

On the night of no moon, rain comes down like the sky falling in skeins and yarny drifts. At sunset I go out to walk all evening. Often she is with me. We stroll, we argue. Our voices soar like toy hawks, high-pitched, shrill, excited as they climb and circle and hunt. I lose her and come upon her.

Frozen ruts of car tracks underfoot. Snow makes the air heavy. She takes off her mittens and bends to the snowbank that slopes in on the road, dabbling her fingers. Playing with the snow she laughs at me. Blood frozen like raspberry sherbet. I touch it to my tongue, but the taste is foul and salty. My breath steams because I am too hot, feverish with wanting.
You’re always wanting something!

After dark, among the trees, teenage boys surround me, but then they fall back. I frighten them. I walk encased in something that protects me. Far into the park in a glade, I find her waiting. The claws of her hands dig into my arm, the nails black with dried blood piercing to the bone. “Is this what you want?” She laughs at me. “Leave me alone! Take me with you! It’s cold and it hurts. It’s getting colder. Mother. Make it stop! Momma! Momma!”

“I will take you with me. I will!”

“Take my death inside. Give birth to me!”

“I will.”

A horn blasts. I scramble out of the street as a cab whooshes past. The street is once again warm and the soft rain soaks into me as if I were a fallen leaf. Wet through and through. My knees are trembling, my calves and thighs weak. Although I have no idea of the time, I can tell by the streets it is well past midnight. If I had my purse I would hail a cab. I am on Central Park West, near Eighty-first. I walk home nervously, fast as my fatigue will carry me. In my hand I hold a wet branch. My palm and my arm are bleeding. On my arm like stigmata are the imprints of nails, deeply scored and bleeding. My own nails are bitten short. With great urgency I hurry home. Whatever protected me tonight has worn off, and I have work to do.

When Alberta gets up to go to the law office (I have given her bed back and sleep on the couch), she finds me at her small tidy desk with bough still wet, my hand and arm bandaged, and several sheets of paper surrounding me covered with drafts of a poem.

Tunneling

I entered the black bough

(lizard scaly, weeping dark snow),

plunged down the sapless trunk

through roots whose fine hairs groped

in the ice-locked mud,

through the pebbly hide of sleeping toads,

their cold hearts almost still,

through the bones of butchered

Indians and mastodons, through