Good Mourning (16 page)

A COUPLE
OF DAYS LATER
, Tony called a staff meeting to make an announcement. Our sales were down. After months of clients requesting cremation instead of a burial (cremations tend to be much less pricey), one-day wakes instead of the traditional two, cheaper flowers, and fewer limos, our profits had taken a
big
hit. So in order to boost sales, Crawford was offering incentives to staff. Steak dinners. Trips to Cancún. All would be available to us, we were told, if we made our numbers from there on out. I tried not to roll my eyes.
Cancún? Is this really their answer?
It seemed that the higher-ups at Crawford's parent company had completely lost sight of what business we were in. Cheap perks felt desperate, and I started to wish I had taken a few finance or business courses in college so that I could offer a better solution.

At the end of Tony's little speech, we were told that as a last-minute reward for our hard work, we were going on a celebratory group trip to Montauk, New York. I had never been a fan of the Hamptons—the two-hour drive through traffic just to see the same people I ran into on Fifth Avenue was
not
appealing. (I was much happier to hole up in my family's country house in the Berkshires, looking out over
the lake and enjoying being away from everyone.) Montauk was even farther east than the Hamptons, and not worth it, in my opinion. But not going would make me look like I wasn't part of a team, and I didn't want to give Monica free rein to tell stories about me by a bonfire, so I decided to go.

The company paid for a big house a few blocks from the beach, which was nice and all, but there was something weird about sleeping and eating and showering in the same space as two dozen of my coworkers. I let other people pick out their rooms and took the small room with a double bed on the first floor that was left over. It was no-frills, but I didn't expect frills. My goal was simply to survive the weekend and maybe even have a good time. Who doesn't like the beach, right?

Wrong. We arrived at the house around three o'clock. I kid you not, by eight p.m., most of the staff was drunk. And not like, “I'm going to adorably laugh at things that aren't really funny” or “Oops! I tripped on the sand!” shitfaced, but more like the seventeen-year-old girls who snuck into nightclubs and downed every shot of Goldschläger that pervy men bought for them until they could barely stand. By the time ten o'clock rolled around, the receptionists were grouped together gossiping, and the funeral directors were venting about all the pressure to make more money, and every­one was bitching about scheduling issues and who got to do what. I heard my name ring out a few times and felt myself pulling farther and farther away from the group until
I wasn't even in the light of the bonfire anymore. That was the thing at Crawford: people never actually talked through problems to say, “This is happening, how can we solve it?” Instead, everyone just complained behind each other's backs. The alcohol seemed to be breaking down those barriers, but not in a good way, and since Bill had plans with his kids that weekend, I didn't even have my usual ally to hang on the outskirts with. I desperately missed my own bed, in my own apartment.

“I'm not feeling so well,” I told Tony, who was one of the few people not slurring his words. In fact, he had been nursing the same beer for over an hour. “I'm thinking of heading to the train station. Would you hate me?”

Tony looked at his watch. “I'm not letting a girl your age head home on the train by herself at this hour,” he said. Even though our working relationship was full of wisecracks, there was still something fatherly about Tony, who actually did have two daughters around my age. “You want to go home in the morning? I'll drive you to the station.”

“I could always take a cab,” I said, although it was unlikely I'd find any car service willing to get me all the way out in Montauk at this hour.

“Just wait until morning, otherwise I'm going to be worried about you all night,” he said. “I'll walk you back to the house.”

“I can walk,” I said, knowing it was only a few blocks. Then, in a lower voice, I added, “You-know-who's going to
make a fuss if you walk me back. I swear, she's been staring at me all night.”

Tony dusted sand off his legs and stood up. “Let Monica think what she wants. I'd rather her make up silly stories than have something happen to you on your way back to the house.” The whole walk took less than ten minutes, and I sensed that Tony felt just as relieved as I did to be away from the group. “Wild crowd, huh?” he said, laughing, almost embarrassed. I laughed too. “Who knew?”

The next morning, I packed my monogrammed T. Anthony overnight bag and checked the train schedule on my phone. When I walked into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee before I left, Tony was already there, reading the newspaper. There was no food in the house—we had ordered pizzas the night before, and nobody had thought to bring bagels or anything for the morning. It was just a can of Folgers coffee that someone had grabbed from the back room at Crawford, plus a Ziploc bag of creamers and some sugar packets. I wondered if there was a Starbucks near the train station that might have better options.

“I think I'm going to head out,” I told Tony.

“I'll drive you,” he said. “The train ride's a few hours though. Let's grab breakfast before you go.”

I certainly didn't have any better options, so Tony and I went to a small mom-and-pop-style café one block over. Even though there was nothing romantic going on, I was tired of Monica's snide comments. All it would take was a
few people from the house venturing out for food (probably hungover) to make my life at work even worse. It was a strange thing; all of these people had worked together for years, some of them even decades, and yet it was old-school in the sense that the men talked to the men, and the women talked to the women. There wasn't much mixed socializing, which was maybe why Monica was convinced that my interaction with Tony couldn't possibly be platonic.

As if on cue, Monica and two of the other receptionists walked by right as the waitress served up my fruit salad and rye toast.

“Oh Jesus,” I said to Tony, turning my head away from the window. “Well, this is just great.”

“You're worried too much about them,” he said. “So they talk. Who fucking cares? Who cares what they think?”

I tried to block out Monica as Tony told me about the pressure he was under at work. I was surprised to have him open up to me, treating me more like an equal than an underling, but I also appreciated it. Big funerals were down, he said. People just weren't spending the money like they had been. He'd never seen anything like it in his more than thirty years in the business. There had been a brother and sister, he told me, who actually tried to save money on their dad's funeral by cutting words out of the obituary. (Charging by the word is standard.) People were still dying, and people were still being put to rest at Crawford—but nothing like before. I thought about the $150,000 funeral I
had planned for Dr. Feelgood the previous year. It was true: families who might have spent that kind of money were now spending half that amount, no matter what their net worth was. As I listened to Tony vent, I better understood the intense pressure he'd been under for months, if not longer. It was his job to keep the ship afloat, and even if I didn't agree with all of his business tactics, I sympathized with the stress hanging over him.

“We're really relying on the preplan stuff,” said Tony, sipping his third cup of coffee.

“Well, there was that one lady who came in,” I reminded him. “Ruth? Remember her? She fell down in her apartment and said that the knock on her head made her realize she should get her funeral in order.”

“Maybe you can do some research when you get back,” said Tony. “Take a look at the numbers across the country. See if we're down more than the others. I can't believe I'm even saying that; we're talking about Manhattan, for Christ's sake.”

When I got home that afternoon—I was so glad to be back, you'd have thought I'd just spent the night in ­prison—I researched sales figures for funeral homes in ­different states. With the whole country in a recession, Crawford certainly wasn't the only funeral home taking a hit. One family-owned business in Ohio got so desperate for money, they actually gambled away the preplanning funds hoping for a big win that would take them out of the red.
They weren't the only funeral home to think of this, either. While Bernie Madoff was burning up his investors' life savings, these guys were also making bets with other people's money. Stories like this no longer shocked me. I'd never thought about money more than when working at Crawford—everyone around me had always just
had
it. Maybe it was the funeral business, maybe it was business in general, maybe it was the tanking economy. All I knew was that the whole world seemed to be grasping for increasingly limited dollars, and it made me uncomfortable, even a little sad.

PRETTY SOON,
the only thing Crawford staffers asked each other after a meeting with a client was, “How much did the family spend?” Everyone was on edge, and some of the union workers started talking about layoffs and who would be the first to go. The way the rules worked, the newest person to each rank was technically supposed to be fired before people at the same rank with seniority. As far as the union was concerned, I was still a receptionist. My title, director of family services, was recognized by Tony—and by our clients—but the union wouldn't give a subway rat's ass.

“Do you think I should be worried?” I asked Bill, who was busy coating a woman's nails with a polish from Chanel's fall line.

“The only thing you should be worried about is Eli
­Manning. It would be nice if he could throw the ball to somebody on his own team for a change,” said Bill.

I wasn't in the mood to talk football. As much as I didn't
need
the job at Crawford, it was the only place I felt like I had a real purpose, and I wanted to be doing something that mattered. Here, I could help people, be there for them in their worst moment . . . and maybe make it suck a little bit less. It was meaningful work, even if it wasn't always so glamorous. And while I knew I wouldn't work at Crawford forever—I saw it more as a place to learn the ropes—I was nervous about starting over somewhere new. I wasn't ready for that. Not yet.

“Don't look so down, kiddo,” said Bill. “Hey, I've got a story that will cheer you up.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “I'm all ears.”

Bill went on to tell me about a woman who had come in that morning with a very, uh,
special
request. Her husband had died two days before, and she had called in a panic saying that she wanted to come retrieve something off his body and that she only wanted to talk to the embalmer. Bill was never on the phones, but they pulled him out of the prep room to take the call. He could barely hold it together when the woman—who was in her late seventies, mind you—said that she wanted to pick up her husband's penis pump, and could he please discreetly remove it for her. This wasn't some air-pump apparatus still attached to his you-know-what. The man hadn't died midsqueeze. The pump had
been surgically implanted into his penis and she wanted Bill to
take it out
and wrap it up so that she could take it home.

“Oh my God,” I said, laughing. “What could she possibly want it for?”

Bill was practically in hysterics. “Exactly! What's she going to do, give it to her new boyfriend at the senior ­center?”

“Do you even know how to . . . you know . . . take it out?”

Bill's whole back was shaking from laughter. “No idea! But I guess it doesn't really matter. It's not like the guy is going to need his man parts again, and I'm pretty sure nobody at the wake is going to pull his pants down.”

“How are you going to give it to her?” I asked. “What will you even put it in?”

Bill pointed to a box of Ziploc bags. “I was thinking those. I'll wrap it in paper towels first, and then seal it nice and tight.”

“Stop,” I said, now also in hysterics.

“Like I always say, can't make this shit up.”

While Bill finished the body he was working on—and then dealt with the penis-pump situation, a show I did not need to attend—I went back up to my office to go over folders. I was only halfway through the first one when my phone rang. There was a man there to preplan the funeral for his sick wife. She had been ill for months, and while she was still hanging on, he wanted to get the arrangements out of the
way. This wasn't abnormal for the terminally ill; sometimes, families just wanted one thing off their plate, or to busy themselves in a stressful time. I was glad the call had come to me—at least I could help make sure he was treated with compassion.

Some clients walked through the Crawford front door almost stoically, taking a very businesslike approach. For them, it was easier to look at this as a simple transaction and not focus on the loss of their loved one, and I could understand that. Others wore their grief more visibly—especially clients who had been helping a loved one through a long illness. It was sadness, fatigue, and relief all rolled into one. It was also immediately recognizable.