Fragile (20 page)

This bed between a closet and a wall is cosseted with full and faded ripeness. The wood floors are bare except for a rug curled up at one end from being kicked and tripped on many times. Her feet have done this, tripped it into a curl. The table
by the bed is stacked with books. She reads, and on the floorboards in the corner by the closet more haphazard stacks of books. The closet smells of must, of clothes she seldom wears. A pair of dungarees lies wadded on the floor. To me this smell is wonderful, this scent of gingham, scent of trees she brought in from the hill.

Each of these things are wonderful, are gorgeous, are all the same as me, and part of me. She keeps her time in one main room where her favorite chair is, her favorite place to read. In all the years she watches her figure still, her bosom sets up high. And yes, of course, she is reading, always reading. What do all the books tell her? How many words has she taken in, how many thoughts and phrases, and look where it has gotten her: Still here in the woods outside of Bremerton, all alone as me. And yet it is Louise, my betrayer and also now a comfort, both of these combining on her body. I would like to bring forth repentance on her body, frail and withered, because her body is now an object to gratify the waves of my remembering, the memories of the children we were still clinging here and set to cry.

I reach out to touch this frail and withered person, and as I do it Father screamed, in memory. Suddenly, I see what book she reads, and the stream of what she's feeling overflows within me, as I touch her massy shoulder, her hair exhausted, betrayer of me. She feels the murk of long neglect, anxiety for what the future holds. She does not look, or move, or talk. She reads the words again
succeeds to night,
and across the room the fireplace doors are a black reflecting glass. Louise, restricted in her chair,
book in hand, head bent to read, as ever she was and has been. And by her side where the image of me in the black fireplace glass should be, there is nothing. There is no me any longer, no me in body, form, or person opens the door to the bright room chilled by air conditioning and a waft of chemical smell overwhelms her. It is as if she has returned to the hospital again, the antiseptic determination of activity about the body, the shining stainless steel equipment gleaming with its promise of purity and health. But here she is a visitor—no, even more, she is one of the workers. And the body they are attending to lies on a steel table, cold, the sight of the bare purple soles of the old woman's feet at the end of the table, toes pointing outward in a horizontal
plié,
confirms it: Holly is no longer the patient.

“You may go ahead.” The woman who has led Holly to the cloistered room and opened the door for her indicates with a stern flat hand a lab table on which various hair cutting and styling tools have been set out. “The decedent made a simple request—to have you duplicate the style you gave her before.”

Holly sees the body lying flat on the metal table, plain white sheet covering most of the naked torso, and cannot conceive of touching it.

“Shouldn't be hard. I just cut her hair on Friday.”

The woman nods. She is accustomed to the monotony of death. One more body on the table, receiving the same treatment. Holly has a sudden panic: What if the woman leaves her here
alone with me, with my body. This body on the table is mine alone, and yet they watch it, shrouded, naked, and cold, with garments unsewn. This body is mine alone to know. No other hand should touch it, no other eyes should see.

The reason why I cannot leave is here beneath me, my cold and naked body, shrouded, all alone. The problem is, I believed in my own suffering, I bereaved my unwanted solemn flesh. I believed that my body was my self, that there is no other temple, and so it will always be. I spend this gazing moment imagining what never now could happen: Bring forth rapport, bring to me my body my own, to house my Soul profuse and dissipate, as though nothing here on earth collapses.

And all the while I am barred from my body. In my impotence I stand alone in terror, and thus remain astonished. They wait and watch and pray, or no, they touch things aside at the table. They talk about my self, defile and transgress. They do not pray, they prepare to touch the hair for the first time, and it is only hair. Holly has to remind herself that this is only hair like all the other hair she touches every day, dead as soon as she cuts it and lets it fall to the floor. All the hair she touches, all the heads she touches, are the same as this, only this one does not move or talk to her. There is nothing inside—that's the only difference. That, and the eyes are closed. They have placed caps on top of the eyes, the eyelids, to cover them, perhaps to keep them shut. She wants to ask the woman about them—these caps are not natural, they keep the eyes closed. But they are better than having the eyes open, staring up at her. The caps are
not good, but Holly cannot imagine having the eyes staring up at her, wide open but unseeing, open but not watching while she does this work. There is only misperception here. A body that no longer works, lying down but no longer at rest. That is what Holly cannot get out of her head as she rinses the hair out and prepares to wash it. This was a person two days ago, who watched her children, who lived and breathed and laughed and gave the girls candy, and brought somehow the shadow of death among them.

The hair is tangled. Holly applies a conditioner to it, working it into the sheaths of longer hair at the back to disengage the follicles. Of course it's tangled. The hair hasn't been washed for several days and has endured whatever illness or trauma led to dying. And then being transported here and lying crushed under the weight of the head for days in which they have done whatever it is they do to a body to keep it from disintegrating. The face is surprisingly supple. The area around the eye sockets has sunken down a bit and the lips are pressed together, taut, but otherwise she might only be asleep. The hair is lathered now and slick, and the action of Holly's hands makes it feel warmer. Motion, motion is life. So she keeps her hands moving, working the hair into smooth dark strands exposed beneath the touch of when shame and reproach would whisper my dismissal, and all the many reasons not to touch rolling through me only kept my wrapped and vanquished body forcefully faltered from explore. I have had a slatted wisdom, a woven tapestry of substitute despair. This helper comes to touch the body I lost, and lovers are
only destroyed by shame and reproach. This helper squeezes my hair in ceremony, squeezes tighter and lets go, working only as much as required to prepare for the final day when my body belongs to the earth.

But it has always been so. It has always been vanity that kept me wrapped and vanquished, bound up in unworthiness, and look at it now, the lips that never touched another, the hands that never held. Look at it under this sheet, a whole breadth of kneaded flesh unused and covered in a veil, unwanted, unentered, never listened to nor held. Kneel and pray and never know a clashing wrong, not vulgar, not if it was a part of me, my body. How could it be otherwise, surrounded by life and suddenly destroyed by shame and reproach. This helper will like the others not hesitate to touch or hide her quick motions, direct and to the point will get it done. There is no need to cut; that was done the other day. So the style should hold nicely. The woman says it is helpful to fasten the hair with bobby pins along the sides where the head will be lying in the casket, in order to keep the hair in place, as the body is removed and placed in the box. How did she say it? As the body is casketed.

Don't think about it. In a box lying there in one position forever, for a very long time at least, until whatever it is that eats the body … don't think about it. And then only bones remain. Comb it forward into a series of layered curls tight around the temples, cheeks, and forehead. Those dim, dark circles she was sinking into, this woman has already gone there. It could have been Holly, could have very easily been Holly here on the table,
circles of darkness each one wider than the one before. In back, the head must be lifted up—this is not easy—in order to comb out and set. The head seems heavy as a bowling ball, putting one hand underneath to lift gently, then comb, and the woman shakes her head from across the room, saying not to worry about that part, it will not be on display in the casket.

Lay the head down gently and comb. The hair is drying now, a little more brittle than usual, but still easy to work with. Comb forward, comb into tight curls around the temples and forehead. No blowdrying according to the woman, which makes it a little more difficult to texture the style. This styling will be viewed only once, by only a few people, unlike the thousands of other cuts and styles she has given over the years that are seen day in and day out for a period of weeks, but this style perhaps is the most important of all, a final lasting image for those who have known this woman throughout her long life. And because it will provide the final image, it must look as much alike the living woman as possible, this woman who failed Holly, who let the one who has fractured her into the house with her daughters. And yet, how could she have known? How could anyone have known? Holly didn't, at first. And neither did the others. So how could this woman, unless Holly told her; and she didn't. So the one who fractured all the lives went into the house and broke open another. But the life he touched and broke open is only the life of the body, only the part of her that will one day lie on a cold metal table like this with only a thin sheet to cover her, and that part of her will shrink and dissipate and turn cold
as the table, so how could Holly all these years let him ruin all the other parts that want to live and breathe forever?

A glance from the woman tells Holly it is time to finish—perhaps there is another body that will soon come to the room and be injected with chemicals. Combing a few more thin strands of hair onto the forehead in a scalloped row of bangs, Holly notices now that the pads of fat around the armpits have shrunk; how she can tell this is impossible to know. But it is true, they look shriveled, less full somehow. All the body, the upper torso around the shoulders she can see above the crisp line of sheet, appears to have shrunk. Perhaps it is because the fat, the cells have lost water, all the water in us that keeps us supple and smooth and lonesome impulse. The hand is a revelation, hand and arm and face closed up, retreated, startling they are still here by themselves, without me. Bring forth to me my body once again, my self is only mine to know. Bring forth to me my hand, my face. Bring to me my arms, my legs, my shoulders bare and cold, my face closed up, retreated. I want to be inside my self again, to go inside the veins, and arteries, and lungs. To go within my heart, to inhabit all the parts of me, to move again, to sweat and breathe and feel the flesh go quick within the movement happens so quickly Holly cannot be quite sure she saw it. But she did see it. The body moved, the arm twitched somehow and the hand jerked up off the table, and it startles her so that she backs away a step and drops the comb
she had been holding. “My God,” she says across the room to the woman, “did you see that?”

“See what?”

“It moved. The body moved.”

The woman comes closer now, not so much to see anything but to be near Holly. She stands beside Holly and is as calm and bored as ever.

“Well, it may have. It happens sometimes. The chemicals we use for embalming will sometimes constrict the muscles as they soak into the tissue, and that can cause an involuntary movement. Just a twitch.”

Holly knows she saw it move, and now she only wants to get out of this room, get out of here as quickly as possible. The woman looks at her and puts a hand on her arm.

“It's okay, I understand how this can be startling.”

Holly doesn't answer. She takes one last look at the sheet-shrouded body and follows a river that flows from one place to forever. Spirit is pure consciousness; Spirit is the everlasting I. The suitable and single I of the Spirit can see and hear more now than I can ever know. I can see the white ascending river that flows from one place to forever, which is the White Abyss.

How can I be one and two and more than that alone? Yet, I can. I flow into the world of perfect forms, by simply seeing it. I embroider all the wreathed and savoured offerings unto every Spirit wild with life that flows here. Many forms and many Spirits move here, all of them borne on a rushing current of white energy from one life to the next. This river is a passage, a way
station, a place where I can seek and find the perfect form in which to live again. This is nothing but a river that rushes through every Spirit with the noble hope of ascending towards another life again.

And yet. I know there is a part of me I left behind, a broken piece of me that lingers on the earth, along with all the other parts of me that did not find their way to Heaven. It suffers still, like all the others. It bundles up and lives again the hopes and fears that were not mastered. It suffers all the unmet longings, all the forlorn passions and potentials that were never found, or were forgotten. But another life is calling. I deliver every crowded willing pleasure. I see more now than ever.

And through the moonlight strangeness of this realm, I enunciate the feverish serving hand. I dictate the fierceness of the offerings, the washed expectant runners through the land, crossing the White Abyss, this tumbling, rushing water, firm with purpose, flush with life. I see alone the perfect ways of all the watching secret things have always been hard to understand, and so they simply have to be obeyed. Certain impulses must be followed, no matter where they might lead. Holly has found herself at the doorstep of the old woman's house with no good reason to be here and no reason to knock; nobody lives here anymore.

The door is unlocked, so she enters. The living room is undisturbed, the late afternoon sun filtering through venetian blinds that clink together as she closes the door behind her. Stillness and quiet surround her. Not even the ticking of a clock
to mar the settled air within this room. Has anyone been here since? There is no sign. The half-eaten bag of chips, the empty soda cans, the recliner still launched at an angle for watching the television, aimed at the box. Why hasn't anyone come to clean? In this dim and settled space she feels as if she is the only one who has ever been here, totally alone.