Rules for being dead, p.3
Rules for Being Dead, page 3
P.S. P.S. I’ve never written so much at one time before, so now I have a blister on my writing finger. I should hold it under cold water to make the pain go away, but I can’t because Daddy’s still in the bathroom, not making any sound at all. Maybe he’s seeing Momma’s face in the mirror, just like I did.
— CREOLA —
My sister Altha had taken Polaroids of my funeral at Cottage Hill Cemetery, snapping away through her tears and counting the number of flower arrangements that had been sent to honor me. Sixty-one full-scale flower arrangements in planters and A-shaped stand-ups and grave blankets. They’d put a special blanket of yellow roses from Corey and Clarke over the top of the coffin where my head would be, even though L.E. hadn’t let them come to the funeral. He thought it would scare them too much.
No, all those upright tombstones and grave markers would have scared them, spread over a plot as large as a football field. Not that they hung out at football fields that much. But in Texas, they were inescapable, plunked down on the landscape as much as these old country cemeteries in the middle of nowhere. Football field, cow pasture, cemetery, repeat. Goalposts and grassy parking lots and barbed wire fences forming the perimeters around them all, holding back high school boys in shoulder pads, cattle and ghosts in equal measure. The scary part for the boys was that they didn’t yet know that there was already so much death out in the world, that each one of those carved pieces of stone connected to a body six feet underneath. They hadn’t lost anybody before me; your mother shouldn’t be your first, not when you’re just seven or ten.
You could have carpeted the entire cemetery with all of those flowers—enough left over for all the old dead people who never got any—that’s how much I was loved. It mattered to Altha, and I guess it matters to me. I’m learning to hang on to things like that since I don’t get a lot of fresh information here. When it was over, Altha asked the funeral home people if they’d ever seen that many arrangements. They thought she was just making conversation. She wasn’t. Altha never just “made conversation.” She wanted exact numbers. Emblazoned across the front of the photos, which she planned to give the boys one day when they were old enough, she’d written down the number 61—with an exclamation mark!—so she’d never forget, as if she ever could. She wouldn’t forget anything about that day, the saddest day of her life.
Well, mine too.
You’d think a woman who had survived the Dust Bowl; who, as the wife of a farmer, had had to stick a knife in a cow’s stomach to relieve it of bloat out on the farm, then keep it alive until the vet could get there; who’d endured class after class of unruly fourth graders, could move on with her life, but not my sister. She was stuck, same as me. She was grieving, same as me; I heard it all when I flew to her house in Plano, thirty miles away.
“You try being scooched up next to your own flesh and blood with a windstorm howling outside and sand seeping in every nook and cranny of your body, then coming out of that Dust Bowl alive, only to have your sister taken from you no more than thirty years later.”
Thirty years, thirty minutes, time made no difference; Altha was still scrubbing out that sand as I heard her talk to her husband, Quentin. One indignity was as bad as the next; Altha’s life was a string of indignities, and what had happened to me was just the latest.
“Hey, eyes up here! I’m the dead one,” I wanted to scream, but I’ve never been able to get in a word edgewise with my sister. Neither could her husband, Quentin, always sunburned from working out in the fields. Or maybe it was just his blood pressure rising from having to listen to her.
“Altha, you’re running off half-cocked …”
“Don’t you tell me about half-cocked. I know about half-cocked, Mr. Man.” (They’d had some problems in the bedroom.) “I know what I think, and I don’t mind saying it. How else do you explain why Perkins wouldn’t let them do an autopsy? Because he knows what they’d find! How else do you explain how a perfectly healthy woman in the prime of her life …”
“Creola was never that strong, and you know it …”
“Well, would you be if you were still picking sand out of your crack, day in and day out? That wears a person down. Just look at me.”
It was the wrong thing to say, because Altha Robinson could slay Goliath with one hand tied behind her back. A hand that was still scratching the sand out.
“All I know is that a week before she died, she came here—a week, just seven days!”
“Altha, I know how long a week is …”
“… came here to look for a nice new apartment to move those boys into. And Perkins was not going to be along for the ride! And if you don’t think that takes strength, you would be sorely mistaken. Leaving that husband of hers who’s always tight as Dick’s hatband. She was going to move those boys here to start a new life, away from that man”—here she glared at Quentin, cursing him for his sex, or lack thereof—“and that apartment was pretty as you please, except for the landlady walking around with a can of beer in her hand. A can of beer. Honestly. Trying to conduct business, and drinking …” She glared at Quentin again; he had a drinking problem too.
“Don’t they all?” I wanted to put in my two cents, but I didn’t want to miss anything Altha was saying. This was news to me: I’d gone to Plano looking for a new apartment? How could I not have remembered that? A little flash of something came back to me: a decoration thing on the dresser in the main bedroom, purple glass balls that were supposed to be grapes, see-through grapes, on a ceramic branch that was painted brown, with twining green leaves. Something fragile the boys would break the first night we moved in. If we did. Which we didn’t. But how could I have forgotten that?
But Altha was rambling on. “I wish the Good Lord had just taken me instead. Sixty-one arrangements. Will I get sixty-one arrangements when the Good Lord sees fit to take me? Hunh?” She challenged him—Quentin or the Good Lord, it was hard to tell.
“Altha, nobody’s taking you anytime soon, believe me. Nobody has the strength.”
“Those poor boys, stuck in that house with that man …”
“Perkins is a good provider. He keeps food on the table and a roof over their heads …”
“And his wife’s corpse in a coffin! And he put it there!” She took a breath, the deepest breath she’d ever taken in her life. “The nerve of that man, keeping those boys from their Momma’s funeral. If only she’d had time to move them all here, so I could watch over them …”
Just a week before I died. Why had I wanted to do that? I was so preoccupied thinking about it and everything I’d heard at Altha’s that I barely made the trip back home from her house to the cemetery at Cottage Hill. My little wing-nubs weren’t decked out enough for such a long trip, not yet.
Home. Heaven. Limbo. Wherever I am.
For the first time, I think I might be in hell.
— CLARKE —
SUNDAY, MAY 1, 1966
Today is May 1, and Momma has been dead for exactly one month. So this doesn’t have anything to do with seeing a movie; it’s just to remember her by, which I do all the time anyway. But to make it official, I’ve decided to start calling her “Mother” instead of “Momma,” because that’s something a little kid would say. But it’s weird to call her anything at all since she’s not here to hear me. “Here” and “hear” are homonyms, which means they sound the same but mean different things, like “Momma” means something different than “Mother.” And “Father” means something different from “Daddy,” who’s never told us how Mother died, which is something a father is supposed to do.
— CREOLA —
Something new is happening, and it’s scaring me. I can’t fly as high as I want to. Something keeps pulling me back down. I can get over the telephone poles, push myself all the way up to the top of the drive-in screen, but if I try to get any higher it feels like somebody’s pulling at my legs, trying to pull me back down to earth. I can’t actually see hands grabbing me—I can’t see my legs, for that matter—but I know somebody’s there, keeping me tethered. Little hands, big hands, they feel like they’re clawing at me. They’ll let me go so far, but then …
Stop lying to yourself, Creola. I said I wasn’t going to lie anymore, but I just did. Those hands grabbing at me? I can see them. I know who they belong to. The boys. Those golden tans they get in the summer, the little peach fuzz hair on their arms turned white-gold, almost like gossamer. Spider webs. They’ve trapped me. How many times did I read Charlotte’s Web to how many classrooms, and now I’m trapped in the same web that Charlotte spun for Wilbur the pig.
I’m still thinking like a human, unable to let go of the old fears. I’m still afraid I’ll fall to the ground, that it will hurt. That it will break my body, maybe even kill me. That’s a laugh. I’m afraid I’ll get comfortable and fall asleep up in a tree somewhere, or on the ledge at the top of the drive-in movie screen. All those teenagers parked in the dark out front will see a body hurtling down past the screen. A split second, and then it would be gone. They’d think it was just a scratch in the print or a hair that got caught in the projector. Or I’ll be outside the Ritz, hunched up on the marquee that juts out—just me and the gray-green pigeon doo—after I’ve watched them change the big, red plastic letters to the next feature late at night, and I’ll tip over and plunge to my death, headfirst.
In my heart of hearts, I know that I’m not alive, that it won’t hurt. That I’m just … air? Thought? But what is it then that hurts so much—physically hurts, like a stabbing pain, or a heart attack—whenever I look down at the boys? It doesn’t feel like the death I was promised. I’m alive and dead, one foot in each camp. Halfway to heaven. Stuck in between. It’s like what they call “magic time” in the movies, dusk or dawn, those magical thirty minutes or so when night turns to day or day turns to night and everything is perfect for just a little while. When nature can trick you, but you don’t mind because it’s so still and beautiful and right. It’s like every minute of my life now—my death—is “magic time.” It’s not day or night; I’m not dead or alive. I’m just … stuck. Wondering where it all went wrong and why I still feel so much pain.
To try and find out, I spend a lot of my time in the tree in the Willises’ yard, across from my old house. The Willises’ son Mike has his tree house up here—some boards he hammered together, an old bedspread hanging in the middle to divide it into “rooms.” It’s not much, but I like to call it home these days, when I’m not at the cemetery. It’s the perfect place for spying on the house I used to have. It’s an okay block, but the houses on it aren’t as nice as the street name makes it sound. I could lose myself on a Woodleigh Drive; couldn’t you? But it isn’t like that. It’s on the outskirts of town, a new development, or it had been when we first moved in. Empty lots dotted with leafless saplings and piles of earth that had been flattened by a tractor, their zippered tractor treads still visible. Now the trees have grown; all the lots are occupied. But the houses are small. Ranchstyle with big picture windows, with carports and porches with supports that jut out like fins. I think they’re supposed to look like the future. Jet set, or at least the Jetsons. The McKinney version of mid-century modern. Every fifth house on the block has the same interior design, although you wouldn’t know that unless you visited them. (I remember my shock the first time I visited the Bruntons’ house at the end of the block, and their layout was exactly the same as ours.) A few brick houses, although we don’t—well, the boys and L.E. don’t—live in one of them. L.E. will put aluminum siding on our house within the next year, when he and that woman …
Well, I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself.
You’ll find out soon enough, just like I did.
The street has nice lawns, for the most part. Corey and Clarke will certainly make their fair share of pocket money years from now mowing them in the summer, when they’re not catching crawdads or poison ivy. (If I’d invested in calamine lotion early on, I’d have become a rich woman from all that pink gunk I had to slather onto their precious little arms and legs.) I just wish we could have done a little better for them. It was a starter house for a starter family, only we never escaped it. Nothing sadder than that, a starter house you’re forced to finish in. Me on my small-town schoolteacher salary and L.E. nothing more than a salesman, working on commission. When the boys get a little bit older, they’ll see that their neighborhood is more lower middle-class than middle middle-class. That “lower” will make all the difference, especially to Clarke, my oldest. He’s not a snob—well, he will be for a while, but he’ll grow out of it.
Anyway. Whatever. Whatevs. It is what it is. That’s what they’ll say in the future, meaning “let’s move on.”
I mostly stay here to see if the boys are doing okay, if L.E. is getting them to school on time, if their clothes are still decent. I keep hoping they’ll get over their fear of heights and come play with Mike Willis in the tree house so they’ll be closer to me, but they seem more scared than ever. They don’t even look up at the sky, but down, at the sidewalk. Their little necks must be aching something awful. Corey hides in the hedges all the time with a sheet over him, thinking that makes him invisible. That big blob of white sheet, through the waxy green of the leaves. It doesn’t matter if the ground’s muddy or not, he just plops down in those bushes. Clarke gets out of his school clothes as soon as he gets home in the afternoon and puts on his bathrobe. Maroon corduroy with gold braid trim; that was my silly touch, to let him know he was a prince. He’s started thinking his clothes are covered with germs—which he’s just learned about in school—after he’s worn them for only a few hours. He thinks that’s how I died, from some kind of germ, because no one has bothered to tell him. Just like no one up here has bothered to tell me.
I thought they were supposed to greet me, all my dead loved ones. Weren’t all of my friends and family supposed to be at the end of some tunnel of light or something, waiting for me? But they’re nowhere to be found. Believe me, I’ve looked. I’m lonelier than I ever was in life, where I had no one but a roomful of children, a sister, and the occasional angry parent to talk to. Even in the cemetery, buried right next to my parents, Frank and Beulah. Nobody’s home. I’d grown up near McKinney and I’d never been away, not even in death. I’d never really thought my life would end as it had begun, in the same small town. Flying above it at night is as close as I’ve ever gotten to being on an airplane and leaving it all behind.
I’ve done my best to remember the prayers of the living and ask them to come to me; I’ve begged them, I’ve screamed to God, but nothing works.
Once or twice at the cemetery, I’ve seen figures in the fog, but when I tried to chase them down, they disappear. Maybe they’re afraid of me. I’d always read in the Bible that in hell, people constantly cast their faces down, as if they were ashamed at being there. But the few people I’ve seen floating around in this in-between look that way too: down at the ground, as if they’re ashamed to be stuck. Not that they did something bad, but that they didn’t do enough good to go straight to heaven. Looking at the ground, trying to figure out why they were still here and not there. It’s the same look Clarke and Corey have now: bent over like little old men, looking down at the ground, like they’re ashamed. Ashamed of having a dead mother.
If my heart weren’t already broken, that would break it for sure.
One time, not that long before I died, I’d gotten them out of their separate classes at school. Their regular teachers were used to my strange ways when it came to my own children. I was taking my fifth graders to get ice cream at the Sabine Valley Ice Cream Parlor a few blocks away. (Sabine? Like the women who were abducted and raped in Roman mythology? What kind of name is that for an ICE CREAM PARLOR, I ask you? Why am I only now feeling this outrage when there’s nothing I can do about it? Yet one more outrageous and unfair rule for being dead.) By the time we started walking away from the schoolyard, it was dark and cloudy and lightning outside. I said that wasn’t going to stop us: “Just focus on the cloud formations and you’ll see carousels and Tilt-A-Whirls and tornadoes of love.”
I tried to teach them to be poets.
I tried to teach them, every chance I got, to see things that weren’t visible to the naked eye.
I tried to teach them to use their God-given imaginations, which could get them out of many a jam.
Leaves were blowing off the trees and the sky was turning purple and green like a bruise; still, I made my twenty-five students—and my own two children—keep walking. A gestapo in a belted shirtwaist school dress, luring them with the promise of ice cream. Any flavor they wanted. I stood at the back of the line so nobody could run away, and I held Clarke’s hand on one side and Corey’s on the other. I held their little hands so tightly they started complaining I was hurting them.
Leaves were blowing and getting tangled in my hair. By the time we got to the ice cream parlor, it was pouring and we were soaked. Some of the girls said it was too cold for ice cream, but I made them get it anyway. I wanted to prepare them for future discomfort, more important that mathematics. That was my job as a woman and a teacher. Cherry vanilla or black walnut or honeydew melon; the store made their own special flavors you couldn’t find anywhere else, and it was my treat. How many other teachers did that?
