The Undertaker's Daughter (32 page)

The next morning Jo and I walked to school together as usual.

“I’m not going to ask you what it was like. That would be stupid. But do you regret it this morning? Are you sorry you did it? How do you feel now?”

“I’m not sorry . . . but I feel guilty. Can you understand that? Not to mention that I’d probably be strung up and quartered if anyone knew. And I’m a little sore.”

“Yeah, I get all that.”

“Is there something you want to talk about?” I’d noticed lately that Jo had been awfully friendly with one of the black boys she’d met at the library.

“I like Dean.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not kidding. Why? Do you think you’re the only white girl in the whole world who could be attracted to a black boy?”

“I don’t know, I’m the only one I know of at this moment in time.”

“Well, now there are two.”

Whoa, Jo! Who would have thought? I wondered if she would have been attracted to Dean if she’d never met me. He was three years older than us and that appealed to her. Jo had never showed much interest in boys—this was the first, as far I knew. She was a loner and never had any friends, other than me. But I did have other friends now, although Jo was the only person I trusted. My friends were a mixed group, some popular, some not. We Jubileans ran into each other on every corner, in every classroom, yet we still had fierce cliques within cliques within cliques. I tried to straddle several groups. Jo was not a joiner.

I soon discovered that my secret life was not the secret I’d thought it was. A few of us sat at the public pool one hot summer day. We were wet and oily and lay on our beach towels, smoking cigarettes, eating potato chips, and drinking Cokes with crushed ice. During a moment’s pause in our chatter, one of the girls, Fay, began chanting. Softly she said, “Nigger lover.” Someone giggled. And then again: “Nigger lover.”

I froze. No one else said a word. The words hung in the air and I couldn’t speak. I pretended that I didn’t hear. The lifeguard blew the whistle and children ran and jumped into the pool; the noise level rose and the moment was over.

These were the popular girls. They thought they knew something about me, but offered neither details nor confrontation. Once in a while the truth popped out like a bad tooth extracted from its roots. And the truth about me was that I was
two people. That truth confused them and made them uncomfortable. They knew me as the person who entertained them from behind the proscenium of the school stage and the church choir loft. They heard my name announced over the school loudspeaker for winning trophies and often saw my name in the paper. I made good grades. They cried when my father walked down the aisle of the
school auditorium carrying a dozen roses for me during a curtain call. And when I least expected it, they softly chanted, “Nigger lover,” while we sat on our towels at the swimming pool in the summer. They couldn’t reconcile the two of us. I was their high-achieving friend with a nasty flaw, one so repulsive to them that I was surprised their suspicions hadn’t already led them to ignore me completely. Girls like me did not stray from the straight and narrow, nor make, in their eyes, foolish mistakes. And they never let me forget it.

I invited the same group of girls to a slumber party at the funeral home. We were just a few months shy of getting our driver’s licenses and still frustratingly dependent on in-house parties and events to entertain ourselves. Jo wouldn’t even consider coming and spoke of the girls with disdain. But I desired to be popular, or at least included. The night of the slumber party was uneventful until we told ghost stories.

“Come on. Someone tell the Bell Witch story.”

“No, not that one. We always tell that one.”

“What about the girl in the cemetery?”

“No, just heard that one the other night.”

“Why don’t you tell one about the funeral home?”

They all turned to me.

“Yeah! You tell one,” they said.

“I don’t know any.” Never would I tell any of these girls about feeling the spirits of the dead bodies hanging around, or whatever they had been. That was for me alone.

“Make one up, for Christ’s sake. This is the perfect setting.”

“Yeah, make one up about the funeral home. That’ll be scary.”

So I told them a story, but I didn’t tell them it was my story, a nightmare I’d had twice already. I let them think I was making it up on the spot. I turned out the lights and lit a candle.

“Okay. There was a girl who lived in a funeral home. One night she snuck out of the funeral home to meet her boyfriend—”

“Who was her boyfriend? Was he a nigger?” It was Fay again.

The silence in the room roared. I shook inside. It had come out of nowhere.

“No,” I managed to say. “The girl’s boyfriend was the son of a preacher. His father was a snake handler and spoke in tongues. He was a Holy Roller, she wasn’t, so they had to meet in secret.”

That kept them quiet.

“When she returned from the date—”

Fay interrupted, “What did they do on the date? Did they do it?”

“I don’t know, Fay. The damn story’s not about doing it. Do you want to hear it or not?”

Finally, silence.

“When she returned to the funeral home from her secret date, she noticed that the hearse wasn’t parked in the garage but in the driveway, which was unusual. As she drew closer, she saw that dead people were sticking their heads out of the windows of the hearse. The ghosts looked like real people, except they weren’t as thick. You couldn’t see through them, but they were kind of like liquid people.”

“Did the girl know any of the people?”

“She thought she recognized them, but she’d seen so many dead bodies that she couldn’t be sure who they were, they were all kind of blurry. The bodies began to come out of the hearse, but not through the doors. They floated through the top of the hearse and through the side panels. There were other dead people still hanging out of the windows all holding their arms open to the girl, like they wanted something from her. And others were peeking out from under the hearse’s underbelly. The hearse was
covered in moving, seeing, breathing dead bodies. She had to get away from them. She could have just run away, they were moving more slowly than she was, but that was not what she wanted. She wanted to go inside the funeral home. She knew it didn’t make sense, but that was where she felt safe. So she slowly moved to the nearest door. It was locked. She tried not to look back, but she could feel that they were almost upon her now. She banged on the door.”

Then, as if I had staged a dramatic effect, just when I said the word
banged
, lightning flashed outside and thunder cracked so loudly it sounded as if it were in the room. A chorus of shrieks ensued, and one of the girls began to cry.

“This room must be haunted,” I whispered.

That was payback for the nigger comment. They formed a line to the bathroom after the fright. I wanted to strangle Fay, but I knew she spoke for all of them. Their fright was but a small victory. They didn’t want to hear any more.

The next morning I was in the kitchen helping my mother with breakfast. When I returned to my room, Fay stood at my chest of drawers, rummaging through the top drawer. She quickly shut it and giggled when she saw me. Another girl was in my closet going through shoeboxes. She, too, giggled. I stood in the doorway looking at them, unable to speak. I was embarrassed that they would be so rude and confounded because I didn’t know what they were looking for. I assumed they sought evidence of something. Maybe they thought they’d find pictures of black boys, or a diary in which I revealed all.

“Guess it’s time for us to go,” Fay said.

“But what about breakfast? My mother’s made breakfast for everybody.”

“I’m not hungry. Are y’all?”

No. None of them were hungry.

These were the girls I’d been handed. And I, in turn, was handed to them. That’s what life in a small town was all about. You live with it, or you leave. My slumber-party days were officially over. I had better things to do at night anyway. Crazy things. I must have been crazy. My parents must have been crazy. When Evelyn left home, I inherited the bedroom with a private door that led outside. A teenager with a private door was a dangerous thing. A crazy thing.

The daylight hours belonged to everyone else. I always did as I was told. Schoolteachers, piano teacher, Sunday-school teacher, preacher, my parents . . . someone was always watching, someone always wanting something. I wanted the night to belong to me. I planned trysts with friends who were old enough to drive. We drove around, drank bad, cheap wine, and felt what it was like to be out in the night when everyone else was sleeping. I planned midnight meetings with Julian. Sometimes I returned only a couple of hours before it was time to get up and go to school. I was terrified that I would arrive back at the funeral home to find the sheriff’s car waiting for me, or at the very least I feared that when I reached the top of those rickety wooden stairs, I would find my parents exploding from anger. My father and I could easily have passed in the night. We walked the same path. It was a miracle that I did not run into him when he was out at every hour of the morning, collecting dead bodies.

Jubilee showed its vulnerable side at night. Men rarely seen out of their suits or work clothes walked past their lit windows in their undershirts; women in curlers and their dressing gowns closed the shutters. But outside, anything might happen. A kind
of freedom was in that. It was worth the fear of getting caught. And with that sense of freedom came an itch to break away from the confines of Jubilee’s ten square miles. I went to sleep in the small hours thinking of that possibility, dreaming of the day when I didn’t have to sleep above the dead bodies, when I would be known to people as someone other than the undertaker’s daughter.

 CHAPTER 13 

T
he seventies crept up on Jubilee and settled like a canker sore. Was it possible to hate an entire decade based on a dearth of natural fibers? A single stray match among all the cheap polyester bell-bottoms in Jubilee and that would have been it. One night after dinner, my father strolled into the living room in a black jumpsuit. I thought the world had ended.

“What?” He looked at the stricken expression on my face. “It’s just a lounge suit.”

“Does the man you buy your suits from know about this?”

“I bought it from him. You don’t know anything. This is sharp. I’m only going to wear it at home.”

Thank God for that. I feared for his reputation.

Valiant attempts at modernism by the youth of Jubilee fell fallow due to a lack of resources. Beauticians struggled with the demand for Farrah Fawcett hairstyles. Scissoring out of their comfort zone, they were forced to interpret Farrah’s look, which
was in opposition to the granny helmets to which they were accustomed. The sight was painful to behold. Their efforts to create a carefree, soft, hip look just didn’t work. I had a friend whose hair featured wings sprayed stiff to the side of her head in an aerodynamic structure. It took her over two hours to ready it for takeoff. I grew my hair long, but opted out of the rough cut. Suddenly denim was everywhere. We modeled ourselves after characters in television shows. For some unknown reason, the denim that Pete, Linc, and Julie wore in
The Mod Squad
bore no resemblance to the denim we wore in Jubilee. Ours was bad denim, the kind adults wore, adults who had no business wearing denim. Not one of us looked remotely like a member of the Mod Squad.

Middle-aged men put away their ties on the weekend and wore turtlenecks and sports jackets. A few women drove out of town to worship at the feet of a city hairstylist who gave them freedom from the holy trinity—teasing, hairspray, and an hour under the dryer. Girdles and slips were relegated to the back of the drawer, and everything hung freely, more or less.

Funerals didn’t change that much. Fresh new preachers arrived in town along with a few more people from the North, who settled into our Southern ways and death practices. Brother Vince got contact lenses and had a devil of a time adjusting. He blinked and teared up so much that the new widows of Jubilee were touched by his obvious display of emotion.