Rules for being dead, p.26
Rules for Being Dead, page 26
I don’t wake up until I’m back in my classroom and my leg starts hurting. My eyes flicker open; I look down and see a big run in my stockings, a new pair I had put on fresh just that morning. A cascade of blood has already ruined them from where my left knee must have hit a rock or something; the dried blood has practically glued the stocking to my leg. Maurice is spraying Bactine right into the wound, right through my stockings, and it’s burning. And smelling. That’s what brings me back to consciousness.
I slowly take in more and more, starting small and working my way up: my bloody stockings, Maurice kneeling at my feet as if he’s proposing, my battle-scarred desk with the little apple from Suzanne already drying up on the corner. And everyone, my students included, staring back at me.
I gather from their faces that something bad has happened, but I tell them I’m fine; I just need a drink of water from the fountain out in the hall. But when I try to stand up, I wobble. I guess something bad really has happened.
Somebody asks—I couldn’t tell you who, I can’t make out individual voices—if I want an ambulance or a doctor.
How ridiculous. I teach fifth graders. I’m not made of glass. “Just let me rest for a few more minutes, and I’ll be fine.”
All the students are looking at me, clustered around my desk. Judy Goodman is crying. Judy Goodman cries at the drop of a hat, usually while trying to explain that she has a thyroid condition and that’s why she hasn’t done her homework.
They shouldn’t see their teacher like this, so I put on a brave face for them. “Miss McLarty, why don’t you read to them while I just rest my eyes for a few more minutes?”
I hear her read the opening words from A Wrinkle in Time, not knowing that it will be the last book I ever hear. (Well, I’ll hear some words from the Bible at my funeral, but I won’t really hear them. They’ll just be white noise.)
Suzanne clears her throat and starts, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
And I think—then and now—so that’s how it starts, this children’s book Clarke will come to love so much and reread once a year, even into adulthood. I thought that was a joke, that opening sentence. I didn’t remember the book really started that way. Just look it up if you don’t believe me. “It was a dark and stormy night.” I promise.
My “few minutes” must have stretched because by the time I open my eyes again, the three weird sisters, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, are well along on their journey, and so am I. The children in the book, Meg and Charles Wallace, so much like my little Clarke, are looking for their father on some other distant planet, and I’m looking for … what? The three o’clock bell has rung. But for once, the children aren’t racing away. They linger behind to make sure I’m okay.
Of course, I tell them, although I’m not really so sure myself.
My head has never hurt so much in my life.
Maurice volunteers to drive me home; his hands are as shaky as mine would have been, putting the keys in the ignition. If only he had stayed to make sure I was as okay as I said I was. But I’m not blaming him; I can point to my own litany of “what ifs” and “if onlys” as well.
That night, I take the boys to the drive-in and then I write a letter; I cry some, and then I try to sleep.
I think I remember the boys kissing me goodbye that next morning, but it’s more a memory I think I should have, an important one, maybe the most important one.
Could I have known that then? Yes. Somehow, I did. Somehow, I knew that is the last time that I will ever see them, at least while I’m still breathing, even if it is through eyelashes that are almost glued shut with tears and sleep. I hear their footsteps go down the hall one last time and the door open, and then close.
I sleep some more; I wake up some more, covered in sweat, the pillow wet underneath me. I take the aspirin we buy over the counter and Dr. Hill’s pills and some of L.E.’s BC powders; pretty much anything and everything I can get my hands on, squeezed tight to try to ward off the pain. Redirect it. The only time my fingers come unclenched is to pry off the medicine caps. Somewhere along the way, I lose track of how many pills I’ve taken; I just reach for anything, and I feel empty pill bottles all over the bed covers. Finally, there are no more pills to take, and my headache has gone away.
I use that last moment of pain-free clarity to scribble a final TO BE READ AFTER I’M GONE on the front of the envelope. Gone to Plano, I think I mean—I must mean—but it doesn’t turn out that way. I use the last little bit of saliva in my mouth to lick the gummed seal on the back of it and close it shut.
Just like my eyes. My lungs.
I hear my own heart stop pounding, and the red-hot echo in my ears finally quits.
The air goes out of my body, and it’s even quieter.
I think, I guess I should tell somebody, but I never get the chance.
There’s nobody left to tell.
I thought … I don’t know … I thought that when I finally saw it, the very end, my last breath, it would be worse, but … I’m just floating, and looking. I’m not feeling any great emotion, no sadness or terror; those haven’t kicked in yet. It’s a strange feeling, being in the house with nothing to do but watch what goes on without me. No dishes to wash, no food to prepare, no boys to separate from fighting or cheer up if they’re pouting, no lesson plans to prepare, no … nothing.
By the time L.E. comes home for lunch to check on me, I’ve been dead for hours.
— CLARKE —
By the time we get home from the Ritz, nobody can sleep. Normally I’d go paste my movie ad in my scrapbook, but I don’t even want to remember the movie anymore, after what we learned there. I don’t even understand exactly what we did learn, or if it’s good or bad or it means Corey still did it, or Daddy did it, or what. Nothing I thought is real anymore.
Daddy acts like he doesn’t understand either, yelling that he’s going to sue the school district. His eyes are as watery as when he was drunk, but this time the only thing he’s had to drink was a syrupy Coke from the concession stand at the Ritz. He got them for all of us, to “calm us down,” he said, but the Coke’s not working. We’re not calmed down at all.
“But she killed herself,” Daddy let out, falling down into his Barcalounger. “Pills everywhere. A goddamn tether ball? Nobody said anything about a shitass tether ball. Somebody would have told me.”
“What did Dr. Hill say?” Rita pipes up, as confused as the rest of us.
“He said a goddamn aneurysm. How the hell do I know what an aneurysm is? I thought it meant that’s what the pills caused. A brain bleed. All those pills. I thought she planned it. She left a note. A letter. For me.”
“What note? I thought you killed her,” I say. It’s out of my mouth before I can even think.
“Are you outta your mind? Your Mumma? You thought I killed your Mumma?”
“You tried to kill all of us,” I snap back at him. “She was gonna leave you, so you killed her so she couldn’t. You wouldn’t let them cut her open to find out! At least that’s what I thought until Corey …”
“Corey what?” Daddy almost whispers, like he doesn’t want to add any more noise to the room. It’s dark in the living room. A slant of light from the window goes across Daddy’s eyes, and they look like they have big red spider webs in them.
“I killed her,” Corey starts to cry again. “To make her feel better. I killed her. I gave her chocolate milk. That’s why I had to get baptized.”
“What the hell is going on? Corey? Clarke? What the hell are you … wait a minute. She wrote about that,” he says, like he’s suddenly remembering something. “The chocolate milk. She didn’t …”
He pulls himself out of his chair and I think he’s going to hit us, but he uses the forward motion to keep going down the hall. I’m waiting to hear a door slam, but instead one opens. The linen closet in the hall.
“Boys, maybe you better go to bed. Maybe … maybe you should … maybe we should just all stay together now,” Rita says. She doesn’t know what to do, so she grabs us both, like she tried to do the last time Daddy took us away.
We hear him coming back down the hall, into the living room.
“I always knew this day would come.” Daddy shakes his head, carrying his Ponderosa model in both hands. I thought he’d quit working on it, but he’s done even more. It actually looks like a home now, where people could live. He’s added a cutout door that swings open and windows with toilet paper curtains. He’s glued on Lincoln Logs for siding, and for smoke from the chimney, he’s used the cotton balls that Rita wipes off her makeup with at night, pulled apart so they’re see-through.
It scares me seeing the model, like he’s going to start drinking again and take us back to the farm. Or shoot at us.
I think it scares Rita too. “Perkins, what are you doing? Haven’t we all had enough of that thing?”
He puts the model down on the dining room table, then puts his left hand on the roof. I can tell that his fingers have gotten so thin lately, without drinking, that he’s had to put a Band-Aid under his wedding ring—the one from Rita, not the one from Mother—to keep it from sliding off.
Daddy pulls up on the roof of the house, and it falls back on hinges, showing everything inside. A box of chocolate-covered cherries. A paperback of Tai-Pan by James Clavell. A whiskey bottle that’s full. A bunch of papers. And an envelope that looks like it’s been opened and closed a lot. Its edges aren’t crisp and sharp anymore, but crumpled up and sort of dirty.
“I should have done this a long time ago.” He hands the envelope to me and Corey. “This is yours. Your Mumma …”
My Mumma what? I don’t want to know about “my Mumma” anymore. I thought I knew, and I was all wrong. I feel like I’m back at the Ritz, about to hear a story I don’t want to hear. I’m seeing things I don’t want to see. How thin Daddy’s fingers are. How yellow they are from all his cigarettes. The envelope he gives us is creamy pink, but Daddy’s fingers are so yellow and callused against it, they look like Cheetos. Five Cheetos, instead of fingers, on each hand.
He puts his Cheetos on our heads, rubbing our hair. “I’ve made so many shitass mistakes. I wanted to protect you boys. I couldn’t let you see … I thought she hurt herself. Everybody did. Well, a lot of people did. But it was that damn playground, not that it makes any of this any better. What she said. I deserve it …”
He starts to give the envelope to me, but now he’s having a hard time letting go of it. He makes a big swallowing sound and starts squeezing the envelope down the middle, so it looks like a bow tie with a knot in the middle. Then he shakes his head and lets the envelope fall on the table, like it was burning him.
I’m the first one to pick it up. On the front of the envelope there’s writing in red ink, like the pen Mother used to write with when she put letters and numbers in her grade book, getting ink on her fingers. It’s like she’s alive again now, in the room with us. Not just with me, but all of us. I open the envelope, and Corey looks over my shoulder. I recognize Mother’s handwriting, her Jungle Gardenia smell still on the paper.
It feels like she’s here with us, even though it’s our other mother, our new mother, Rita, who takes the letter from me and starts reading it out loud.
My husband,
Remember the movie we went to see, your third or fourth leave in town? Tammy and the Bachelor? I took the boys to see it tonight and thought a better movie has never been made. Oh, maybe it wasn’t just the movie, but the flood of memories it set off in me. I want to get them all down on paper while I can, before it’s too late. I want you to remember too.
You laughed at the movie, but I cried. At the end, Debbie Reynolds and Leslie Neilsen held hands and walked into that beautiful old mansion that his family owned. He was going to give that poor country girl everything she deserved. I thought if I’d been Tammy, I’d have let him go in first, so I could stay outside, by myself, in the cool night air. I’d squeeze myself, not quite believing my luck. Just then you put your army jacket around my shoulders, like you’d read my mind, like you’d felt the chill that had just gone through my body. Nothing so romantic had ever happened to me.
You kidded me, with your kidding that was never mean, not then; with your love that was never mean either, not then. When I told you I was pregnant with our first son, you cried with happiness. I said, “He’ll be smart, and he’ll see things, he’ll know things. We’ll name him Jack for Jack and the Beanstalk, because our dreams for him will reach all the way to the sky.”
You laughed at me and my fairy tales, and got me to laugh too, at how silly I was. What a beautiful laugh you had when you weren’t drinking. When you weren’t hiding things from me. That laugh took away everything bad. So did the words we both knew weren’t true, that you said anyway, after I told you we were going to have a son. “Creola, you are so goddamn beautiful.”
I wasn’t beautiful, I was afraid. What if I wasn’t a good mother? What if I wasn’t a good wife? What if I wasn’t a good teacher? Your lies always made my fear disappear. “You are so damn beautiful, Creola, you just don’t know it. You just needed someone to tell you. And that’s me. Our son will be just as beautiful.”
You told me you wanted pearls and roses to lay at my feet, but all you had was Juicy Fruit. That became our joke. When Clarke came into the world, there I was at the hospital, looking like something the cat dragged home, and you came in and laid a bouquet of Juicy Fruit on my breast. Juicy Fruit instead of flowers, because that’s all we could afford, but I still felt like a queen who had just given birth to a prince. It was our joke, our future. We said that gum would hold us together, forever.
When Corey was born, you said it again.
I thought no moment could ever be so bright.
Now I think no moment could ever be so dark. You’ve found another woman, not the first, but the first time I don’t know what to do except leave.
Rita gives the letter to Daddy then; she can’t keep reading it. She’s crying, and her eyes can’t see. “Perkins, I can’t …”
Daddy says, “It wasn’t your fault. It was mine. And now we’ve got to finish what I started.” He puts on his bifocals. “It doesn’t get any easier the more you read it. I’ve tried. A dozen times at least since I found it. Boys, you can hate me all you want. I deserve it. But you have to promise … never hate your Mumma. And don’t hate Rita. It was all my fault.”
Now he takes over, pulling me to sit on one of his legs and Corey to sit on the other. Six legs are on the floor now, and his big arms are reaching around us to hold the letter in the middle. I don’t remember him ever reading us bedtime stories when we were little, Mother always did, so it’s weird to hear him reading like this. I don’t want to listen, but I have to. We all do.
For a while, I thought about really leaving and taking the boys with me, on the ultimate journey. Coming home from the drive-in tonight, the streets deserted, it would have been so easy for me to just press my foot down on the gas pedal. I’d turn it into a game and we’d all laugh and laugh, fast and faster and fastest until we hit something. But I couldn’t be certain it would take us all, and the boys have done nothing to deserve that. I’ve had my life, but they haven’t. Let that be my final gift to you: that I didn’t take your sons. I got them home safely. I got them home, where you weren’t to be found. They deserve better than that.
Corey fell asleep at the drive-in, so Clarke helped me carry him in. I was right about Clarke. He sees things. He knows things. He tucked Corey into bed tonight, better than I ever could have. Corey, my sleeping angel. He is beautiful when he is still and asleep, but just as beautiful when he shakes with his angel disease.
I kissed him one last time, and that woke him up. He felt my tears on his precious little face, and he tried to make me feel better. He brought me a glass of chocolate milk, to help me sleep, then toddled away, back to bed. But I couldn’t drink it. Holding that glass to my lips would have made me think of how much love you and I used to share, when the boys first came into our lives and I thought things could get better; I should give you a second chance. A third chance. A fourth. But now, I’ve given you all the chances you deserve.
So I emptied the glass onto the floor without taking a sip, and it disappeared into the rug. A glass of spilt chocolate milk is letting you off too easy. You and your girlfriend can clean up the mess it leaves, just like I’m leaving you.
“You mean … she didn’t drink it? I didn’t kill her? She spilled it?” Corey stops Daddy cold.
“Corey Banorey, if I had thought … if I had known, in a million years, that you were thinking that …”
“But I did it. I mashed up the pills.”
“She mashed up the pills. She took those, but not the ones you gave her. She spilled all that. You have nothing to feel bad about. It all makes sense now. That goddamn tether ball. Goddamn me. Not smart enough to take her to the doctor. Out so goddamn late …” Daddy is crying so hard the paper’s getting wet, and her red handwriting is getting all smeary.
I grab the pages from Daddy. “That night at the drive-in? She came back and wrote all this?” Before Daddy or Rita can stop me, I start reading what’s left aloud.
My Clarke, my Corey, the two names I will shout aloud at my Final Judgment, which is fast approaching. At least you gave me them. That’s the one thing—the two things—I can’t hate you for. For the rest of their lives, and mine, I will surround them with the carousels and Tilt-A-Whirls and tornadoes of love, which you once promised me.
That was the end. There wasn’t anything else, not even her name.
“Your Mumma …” Daddy says, the thing he always says when he can’t think of what else to say. “She wasn’t in her right mind when she wrote that. She was … confused. The tether ball, the pills made her all confused …”
He doesn’t know what else to say, and neither does anybody else. So nobody says anything. And nobody stops me when I take the letter for myself and walk back to our bedroom to put it under my pillow, as evidence of love.
