Rules for being dead, p.25
Rules for Being Dead, page 25
He was thinking, Oh sweet Jesus Lord, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna tell the boys that their Mumma is gone?
He sat there, her face up against his, kissing and kissing her gray-streaked hair and trying to warm up her body and feel any last little whisper of air coming out, but there was nothing.
And then there was something.
An envelope. A letter, tossed onto the bed alongside all those empty pill bottles.
He picked it up and read; his thoughts switched to How am I ever going to let the boys read this and hate me as much as their Mumma did in her final minutes?
His fist tightened up and formed into a ball around those pages, but he couldn’t throw it away. He couldn’t destroy what amounted to his wife’s last will and testament. He couldn’t get rid of the letter, but he couldn’t look at it again. Ever. But he couldn’t leave it for the boys to find. And then find out about him.
So he smoothed out the pages, folded them and stuck them back inside the envelope. Where to put it? The boys were always sneaking around in their parents’ bedroom, digging in drawers and closets, trying to find secrets; they could find anything.
And then he spied the perfect hiding place: his Ponderosa dream house. L.E. lifted the roof off and put the envelope inside along with all his other secrets.
Let the boys think whatever they wanted about him; what a bad father he was, a bad husband. He could take it. But they would never be allowed to know that their Mumma killed herself. As long as L.E. was alive, they would never know that. The letter didn’t say that, not exactly; it just said she was leaving him, but how else could he interpret all those empty pill bottles all over the bed cover, all the hate in those pages?
Such a goodbye, such a Fuck You. How could she do that to her very own children?
Let them hate him but never know enough to hate her because of what she had done her last day on earth. Which he had caused.
— CLARKE —
From up in the balcony, behind an opening in the curtains, I’m pointing the pistol at the back of Daddy’s head down below.
I don’t hear anything except the noise on-screen. And in the Ritz. Everybody’s cheering because the older kids have found Betty inside the log cabin. They’re untying her and rubbing her wrists and ankles to bring her back into circulation. They’re putting her on their shoulders to bring her back to her parents. Mr. Barker’s camera is circling around and making Betty look like she’s spinning around in slow motion, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Betty’s finally free.
And now I can be too.
I aim the pistol and hold it firm and steady with both hands against the kick I know will be coming.
That’s when I see myself up on-screen, in a close-up. It’s like my smile is something they did in editing, it’s such a surprise. I forget I don’t like my teeth and the big gap between the two front ones, and I smile back at the version of me that’s smiling on the screen.
And then someone comes running at my knees and knocks me down inside the curtains. The curtains come down with me as I’m tussling with something I can’t make out that’s beating on me from the outside of the red velvet while I’m trying to dig out from inside.
It’s Corey, hissing at me, trying to find the opening in the curtains. “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”
“What are you doing? Get away! You’re gonna get hurt,” I whisper at him, still trying to be quiet, still trying to carry out my plan.
“No,” he snaps back. “I read your scrapbook. You’ve got it all wrong.”
The heavy curtains are soaking up all the noise we make, and the clapping and cheering in the theater are covering up the rest as Corey and I fight for the pistol. “Get out of the way! Daddy killed her! Mother! He almost killed you. Now he’s just getting what he deserves.”
“NO! I’m telling you …”
“I’m telling you. He gave her pills, so he could be with Rita! He’s got blood on his hands!”
“No he doesn’t. I do. I’m the one who gave her pills. I’m the one who killed her.”
The final credits from The McKinney Story are rolling up on-screen, and our names are there, but I’m missing all of it because I’m trying to untangle myself from the curtains. Trying to get Corey off me. Trying to understand this outrageous thing that Corey just said that makes no sense, just like me thinking I could shoot Daddy and make the pain go away. And that would make Mother go away. I don’t know which thing I’m crying about more.
Corey’s crying too, like everything he’s held in for a year is finally pouring out. “I killed her. After Mary Poppins. I wanted to make her better, but I killed her. It’s all my fault.”
“Corey, you’ve gone nuts. Daddy killed her. You’re all mixed up. Everything’s gone crazy.”
Downstairs, they’re playing a Looney Toons cartoon before they start showing The Brass Bottle. There’s so much noise with people leaving and laughing and the cartoon playing that nobody can hear us. Only a few people are still left in the balcony anyway.
“You don’t know everything like you always think you do! You don’t know what I did, that last night. After Tammy. After Mary Poppins.”
“What does Mary Poppins have to do with it?”
“She gave me the idea. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
I’m getting scared again. I don’t want to hear anything else. Daddy did it. I know it. Mother told me, in my dream. She wouldn’t lie to me.
“Mary Poppins is a movie. She’s not real. She’s not a person.”
On-screen now, The Brass Bottle is starting, and I know Daddy and Rita will be looking for us, but I’m thinking back to when Mother took us to see Mary Poppins in Dallas. Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke sang and danced with penguins, and men with sooty faces climbed up chimneys, and a poor old lady fed the birds.
And Corey had a seizure. A bad one.
“Mary Poppins said a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, that’s how Mother gave me my medicine, in a glass of Bosco with sugar stirred up in it, so that’s how I’d give her some medicine. She was so sad and sick all the time, I thought if my medicine helped me, wouldn’t it help both of us?”
“Corey, what did you do?” I’ve finally got the curtains off us, and I’m trying to pull him back into a seat so I can make sense of this. But all I can see in my head is us at Mary Poppins when Corey had a seizure and threw up his popcorn and Coke on everybody.
I want to throw up too; everything’s getting mixed up. Mother and Mary Poppins and Tammy and Rita and a new lady coming in to take care of us, when the other lady dies. They’re all the same person.
“Sorry sorry sorry,” Mother had said at Mary Poppins, to the people around us.
“Sorry sorry sorry,” Corey had said to me and Mother, and kept saying it, crying too, when we walked out of the Majestic Theater in Dallas. It was a foggy night outside—I looked for the bird lady, to give her tuppence—and I could tell something was different. Something was broken.
I was embarrassed by Corey, even though I hated myself for it.
I hated myself for everything. For this whole past year. For what I thought. For what I did. For what Corey’s saying he did. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I just wanted to make her feel better. I didn’t want to make her die.”
“Corey, what did you give her? Is that why she was so sick the next day and didn’t go to school?”
“I don’t know. I think so. We got home from Tammy, and that’s when … that’s when I did it. I crushed up some of the blue pills she took and some of the pink pills I took. I mixed ’em together in some Bosco. Seven pills, for as old as I was. One pill for every year. That’s how many years I’m gonna have to spend in hell, to be punished.”
Corey’s never said that many words in his whole life. He’s never cried that much in his whole life.
Just then, Paul, from the projection booth, comes into the balcony. He’s smoking a cigarette in one hand and blowing smoke rings, and in the other, he’s twirling a big flashlight like a baton. Doing tricks with it, aiming its beam right in my eyes. “Hey, Hollywood, good job, but they’re looking for you downstairs. I’m the search party. S-O-S. S-O-S.”
With every letter, he flicks the light on and off: first aiming it up from under his face like a candle inside a jack-o’-lantern, then shining it in our faces. On-off, on-off. Like that traffic light swinging on its cable out by the drive-in. There’s too much going on at once. Too much to think about. Too much to remember. Too many places to be.
Paul’s blinking flashlight makes Corey start shaking, like his nerves are suddenly going on and off like the light.
Another seizure. Just like at Mary Poppins.
“Stop it. I’m getting sick,” Corey is trying to say to Paul, but his voice is whispery and so up-and-down and back-and-forth, like he’s trying to keep from throwing up, that nobody can hear him but me.
I grab his body, to keep his shakes from exploding. Now I don’t care who hears us. I yell at Paul, “Go get somebody! Help!” Paul stamps out his cigarette on the carpet, then runs down the stairs. I hold Corey even tighter. “Shhhh, shhh, it’ll pass …” I think that’s what Mother used to say to him; I can’t remember anything I’m supposed to do.
“It’s all my fault. I didn’t mean to … I swear I didn’t …”
“You’re just a kid. You didn’t know.” Am I really saying that to the person who killed my mother? I can’t believe it, not after all this. After everything I’ve gone through and thought this year. After I’ve brought a gun into the Ritz and almost …
Above us, through the cutout in the wall for the projector, I can hear the film strip start flapping around because Paul isn’t there to switch over to the next reel. A plastic thwacking sound every time it makes a complete turn. There’s nothing but pure white light pouring onto the screen now, and everybody downstairs starts yelling.
“Hey, wake up! Fix the movie, asshole! We want our money back!”
Daddy and Rita run into the balcony now, and I think they’re going to start yelling at us too, just like the kids downstairs. Mr. Ring and Miss McLarty and even Mr. Barker, the movie director, come running in with them. I hear Paul in his booth above us, trying to get the movie back on track. It’s playing on the screen again, but now he’s pushed the wrong button or something and it’s running backwards. Burl Ives is getting sucked back into his brass bottle, and a cloud of smoke is pulling back in after him.
“What the hell happened?” Daddy’s yelling, as he squeezes into our aisle. “This shitass place should be condemned. Making children sick.” He grabs Corey and holds him, then sticks the edge of his hand into Corey’s mouth so he can’t bite his tongue. Corey’s knees are jerking up and down against the concrete floor, and his whole body is vibrating.
“I’m here now, I’m here, we’re all here,” Daddy whispers to Corey. “It’s your angel disease. Just let it pass.” Now Daddy’s crying too, except his tears are going onto Corey’s head and his big scar, from where I flung him against the edge of the couch.
Daddy reaches toward me and I think he’s going to slap me for causing Corey’s seizure, but he just squeezes his hand on my shoulder and pulls me into a group hug with Rita. The four of us are so heavy piled up around Corey that he doesn’t have any more room to shake. He finally stops, then looks at us like he can’t quite remember what just happened.
“Give him room, give him room to catch his breath. There’s my boy. There’s my good little angel,” Daddy says.
Rita wipes the snot and tears off of Corey’s face with the lapel of the new dress she bought.
Nobody knows what to say now except for Mr. Barker, but I think he’s just saying it to make us all laugh. Cuss words around children do that. “Betty Fucking Davis. Gotta hand it to ya, kid. You’re one of a kind. You see the close-up I gave ya at the end? Next time I make this crappy movie, I’m gonna change her name, in honor of you.”
I guess it’s a compliment, but it makes me … I don’t know. Sad? The movie’s over, Corey’s still sick, Mother’s still dead, Daddy’s not dead, and nothing’s like it was supposed to be. Nothing in the past twelve months is like it was supposed to be.
Mr. Ring slides into the row in front of us. “Corey, we can’t have you getting hurt too, like Clarke did at the pool. Like your mother did, out at the playground. I can’t take much more!”
Now Miss McLarty chimes in too, talking to all of us, like at a parent-teacher conference. “Oh, that was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. Makes me think maybe I’ve chosen the wrong career. To see a fellow teacher laid out like that …”
Daddy looks up from Corey. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Miss McLarty looks confused; even in the dark, I can see it. She looks at Mr. Ring like Did I say something wrong?
But she keeps talking, and everything she says turns into a movie. Something that can’t be real. Something I’m watching from some other balcony. “Well, the accident … out on the playground? I still feel so guilty about it. If I hadn’t been yacking away … if she hadn’t been turned around and looking at me instead of where she was going … then she wouldn’t have run into that tether ball.”
Now Daddy’s getting mad again. “What accident? What tether ball?”
“Well, the one that knocked her out,” Miss McLarty says. They’re laughing downstairs at the movie, but nobody’s laughing up here. “I thought you knew. Didn’t she tell you what happened?” She looks at Mr. Ring, “I thought you told him.”
He looks back at her and all of us. “I thought you told him.”
“Nobody told you?” Miss McLarty looks like she’s about to get as sick as Corey just was. “We were out on the playground and she got hit, and I guess her brain started bleeding so bad … wait … is it bad, or badly?”
Badly, I would have said, if I could talk just then. But I couldn’t. Nobody could.
— CREOLA —
I feel like I’m getting knocked in the head all over again.
Nobody told me, either.
Creola on the playground with a tether ball, like in some demented, real-life version of Clue? It knocked me out and I didn’t remember? A silly playground accident and … I didn’t kill myself? How could that be? I wrote a letter. A goodbye letter. I took pills. Too many pills. How could I … But maybe I took them to make the headache go away and I just went away instead. Maybe the tether ball just did the work for me, that I was too cowardly—too afraid—to do myself. Maybe …
I don’t know.
It was the perfect storm—something they’ll have in the future—of being a teacher and being an unhappy wife and being a not-perfect mother and wanting to leave everything behind, not be tethered to so much sadness anymore, even if it meant leaving the boys.
But what kind of mother would do that?
A very sick and sad one, like I had become.
Maybe that damn tether ball hit the exact part of my brain where memories reside. Maybe I didn’t tell anyone about the accident because there wasn’t anyone to tell at the very end. I never told L.E. because he wasn’t home that night. I didn’t tell the boys because I didn’t want them to worry. Maybe I didn’t want to remember myself and know that it was all going to be over so very soon. I knew my hours were already trickling down, just like the blood in my brain.
Just like the memory comes back to me—not a trickle, but a deluge.
It’s a beautiful spring day. Blue sky. Green leaves. Solid brown earth. That first sweet-and-sour smell of sweat on children, when they can get out and really play in the sun after months of being cooped up.
I’m out on the playground with Suzanne, admiring her rust-colored poor-boy top and thinking maybe I should buy one too, after I get to Plano. Throw out all those boring teacher dresses I have, those prim-and-proper outfits, and really make myself over. Get a new hairdo. Do something different to celebrate my freedom. I’m thinking how lucky Suzanne is to still be free. To be just starting out. I was like her once.
My students call me over to the tether ball pole; they want me to referee!
I’m barely taller than they are, ten-year-olds; I feel as if I’ve shrunk so much this last year, all the trouble with L.E. eating me up alive. My clothes just hang off me now. Maybe I’ll start filling out again once I get free of all this. Altha would love nothing more than to fatten me up.
I get close enough to the tether ball pole to see that the silver paint is flaking off and layers of rust from underneath are peeping through. I’m close enough to see that the rope the ball is attached to is gray. It’s left out there on the playground year-round, through every kind of weather. Rain, sleet, snow; tornadoes of love. That rope is always there, fraying bit by bit.
I’m about to tell the kids to be careful; my mouth is open.
Just then Suzanne asks me something. I think it’s, “But if there’s just one thing that makes a great teacher, what is it?”
She’s got a steno pad out, eager to record my every precious word. Looking for lessons, even out on the playground. I turn toward her, teaching until the very end, and that’s when it happens.
I get hit in the back of the head by a tether ball.
Black-and-white leather, gridded off in triangles like that air raid sign Clarke is so obsessed with. All that pressurized air inside, smacking into my skull harder than I’ve ever been hit before. The back of my head, the side of my head, that flat plane of skull and skin right next to my right eye socket—it feels like the ball hits me everywhere at once. In all the anger L.E. will have when he finds out I’ve left him, he couldn’t have hit me that hard.
I feel it for just a second—I think I even hear something crack—and then I don’t feel anything at all. I don’t feel myself hitting the ground; I don’t feel all those hands lifting me up—Mr. Walker, the principal; Maurice, finally getting his hands on me just like he wanted to at Woods Motel; some of the bigger boys who will drop out before they even finish high school (size and brute strength all they have going for them, and all they ever will).
