Rules for being dead, p.7
Rules for Being Dead, page 7
Dying while the doctors tried to save him.
We only had fifteen or twenty seconds together, but it felt like a lifetime.
He floated up above his lifeless body on the operating table, covered with a sheet except for the opening where they worked on his head, pulling thick black thread through his scalp to close the wound.
When he died for those few seconds, they had to throw off the sheet and put electrical paddles on his chest. They should have put them on me, to keep me from dying all over again when I had to witness that. My second born, dying. Going once, going twice …
From his new position up in the air, I saw him look down on himself and smile, like he was finally at peace, not feeling any of the jolts pulsating through him and making his body jump like he was having a seizure.
It wasn’t him down there anymore, just another little boy he could smile at.
I saw Corey waver out of the room and look at his father crying and smoking while a nurse tried to put out his cigarette, and I saw him also look at Clarke, barricaded in a pay phone booth, his feet pushed against the door so nobody could get in.
Corey just placidly observed it all—maybe there was a lesson for me there: just look but don’t get so riled up—as he floated toward the snack room where he magically got a hot chocolate from the vending machine without having to pay for it. He just looked at the machine and grinned—my baby happy again!—and a little paper cup plonked out and filled with powder, then hot steaming water, then mini marshmallows.
He took the cup, but he didn’t drink from it; he looked around for someone else to give it to.
That’s when he saw me smiling at him.
That’s what he had brought to me, my last night alive. I remember it now: a glass of chocolate milk, holding it out to me so carefully with both hands so not a drop would spill. He was just as mindful now, floating through the clouds with the hot chocolate calling to me. “Momma, momma, where are you? I have something to tell you. I’m here.”
Now the look on his face changed. He didn’t look happy anymore; he looked worried. He looked scared now that he could see me smiling at him, welcoming him. Company, finally! A child to talk to and read to and teach, like I was meant to do.
“Corey, it’s me! I’m right here! Just keep following my voice!”
“No, I can’t. I’m hurting too much. The hot chocolate is burning. My head is burning.”
I knew he couldn’t stay here with me. I knew it wasn’t fair. As much as I wanted to see my son, to hear what he had to tell me, I told him he had to go back. That he wasn’t finished. That it wasn’t any fun to die too young. And seven was too young. Just like forty-four.
The second I thought it, he plummeted back down into his body and couldn’t hear anything else, certainly not me. He could just feel things: a surgeon’s scalpel slicing into his scalp. Those thick needles going into his skin.
And then I’m alone. Again. Naturally.
Maybe seeing me is what scared him into becoming the boy who fell to earth. I don’t really know what I look like anymore; they don’t have any mirrors here, so maybe it’s not pretty, not that I was ever “pretty” in real life. I wouldn’t want to look at me either, having to send my littlest angel back to earth. I felt like Judas Iscariot sending Corey back to earth. Like I’ve betrayed him somehow.
— CLARKE —
SATURDAY, JUNE 17, 1966
Usually we just see one movie at a time at the Ritz, not two, but Daddy says the Ritz is a good babysitter for us on the weekends. So today we saw Fireball 500 with Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, where “they treat their dames and their cars the same … Rough!” That’s what it says on the poster. We also saw A Patch of Blue, about this girl who is blind, and Sidney Poitier, who falls in love with her. She falls in love with him too, but she can’t see that his skin is a different color than hers.
Tonight I wished that I was blind and deaf when Daddy started saying that Mrs. Cobb might be our new babysitter, only now we should call her “Rita.” He took us to dinner at her house and made us get dressed up and wear shoes and socks even though it’s summer and we usually go barefoot. Her house was leaning and her lawn needed mowing, and Daddy says it would be “a nice gesture” if we mowed it for her.
Rita made pot roast with potatoes and carrots and onions. She said it looked like it took a lot more trouble than it actually did because you really just “throw everything in a pot and turn it off two hours later.” I could tell she was trying to be funny, but she was too nervous for the joke to work. She was nervous the whole night and kept bumping into things, like the blind girl in the movie.
She let me and Corey have our strawberry shortcake on TV trays in front of the TV, because she said that’s what she’d be doing if we weren’t there. Just watching TV in her housecoat. She said that she wanted us to feel free to do that anytime we came over, which she hoped was going to be a lot more from now on. I saw Daddy shake his head No at her, like he was trying to get her to notice him but not let us notice him.
We watched Daktari on her TV while she and Daddy sat at the table by themselves. I watched them out of the corner of my eye. She whispered, “It’s going good, isn’t it?” to him, and he nodded back, but now he seemed as nervous as she did and switched to drinking beer instead of iced tea.
The TV picture got fuzzy, so I got up to jiggle the rabbit ears that had little aluminum foil flags on them for better reception. Rita had a lot of pictures in frames on top of her TV—of a man in ice skates, of another man not as old, and of a kid with red hair. That was the big picture in the middle, which meant it was the most important one to her.
It was a photograph of that kid who had been playing at Daddy’s store, calling him Freddy. He was easy to remember because of his red hair and freckles and the missing part of his ear. He was easy to remember because he shouldn’t have been on top of Rita’s TV.
“It’s that kid,” I said, without realizing I was talking out loud.
“Oh. That’s my son, Gibson, and that’s my grandson Ricky,” Rita said. “You’d like him. Another little boy to play with. You should meet him.”
We already have, I wanted to say, but didn’t. And we wouldn’t like him, but I didn’t say that either.
A little bit later, we were saying goodbye and Rita was signing her name on top of Corey’s turban—it was filled with so many names now from where his friends had signed it that it looked like his hair had grown back in black, not blond.
That’s when I stole the picture of her grandson. I was shaking so much I thought the glass inside the frame would rattle and give me away, like it had just given Daddy and Rita away.
P.S. We’re home now, and everybody’s asleep except for me. I’m too afraid to sleep because I think I’m going to get in trouble if Rita finds out her picture is gone. But I’m not going to give it back. It’s evidence, and I’m keeping it under my bed with Mother’s magazine and Daddy’s tie and the broken pieces of My Fair Lady. But now I’ve found something else that I never realized was evidence before.
It’s the register from Mother’s funeral, which in this case is a noun and not a verb, like when you “register” for school. This register is something that is, not something you do. It’s the book you had to sign your name in if you wanted to see Mother at the funeral home. The outside of it is covered with padded white silk, and there’s a watercolor drawing of a weeping willow on top of it. Sometimes when I look at it, which I do a lot, I end up holding my breath without even knowing it, and I have to make myself remember to breathe again. But I’ve never looked at it all the way through, until tonight.
It has pages telling you about what kind of flowers she had at her funeral and who brought them, and what kind of music was played, and what the preacher said. It’s good to have a memory of stuff like that on paper because I don’t have it in my head. Daddy wouldn’t let us go to her funeral, even though he made us go to the funeral home the night before for the last chance we’d ever have to see her.
At the funeral home, they had colored spotlights pointed at her body to make it prettier, but they reminded me of those lights they point at roasting chickens at Piggly Wiggly’s. The lights are red-orange to keep the chickens hot, and that’s what the ones on Mother looked like; like they were there to keep her hot instead of let her get cold.
You buy the chickens when you’re too tired or too drunk or too dead to cook, so we’ve had a lot of them this year. You cut them up when you get home, and that’s how they’re different from Mother, because Daddy wouldn’t let them cut her up, even though Aunt Altha wanted to, to see why she died.
When I first saw Mother in her coffin, I stopped moving, but Daddy kept pushing me forward from behind. Daddy’s shoes kicked my ankles—maybe he just bumped into me, but it felt like he kicked me—and it felt like little knives popped out of the tips of his shoes, like the ones Lotte Lenya wears in To Russia with Love.
When we got to Mother’s coffin, if you didn’t like the way she looked in it, you could see how she looked in real life because Daddy had them put a painting of her up on a stand behind the coffin. He’d had it painted for her years ago as a present. Her mouth is open just a little bit, like she’s trying to say something.
Tonight, under my covers with a flashlight, reading her register, I think I finally figured out what she was trying to say. To me. I went through every page and saw all the names of people who came to see her at the end; teachers from school and people from church and our neighborhood. But there was one name at the bottom of the very last page that wasn’t from any of those places. The last name, the last person to get to see her before they closed the coffin lid and put her in the ground.
It was from Shaw’s Café.
It was from My Fair Lady.
It was from Rita Cobb.
— CLARKE —
SUNDAY, JUNE 19, 1966
I know what happened.
I’d thought it, but I didn’t want to believe it.
Now I’ve thought it some more, overnight, and I know for sure.
It happens in movies all the time.
That’s how I know.
— CREOLA —
Now I remember. I’d actually talked to her before I died.
Rita Cobb. The shoe lady. L.E.’s lady.
I did more than just watch her from outside her window; I went in and talked to her. With my red shoes. The ones L.E. had me buy to go with my Mexican “señorita” outfit, which I’d bought when L.E. won Salesman of the Year at his store and got a free trip to Mexico. There’s a picture of us coming out of the plane, walking down the steps of that pulled-up stairway down onto the tarmac. You can see the heat radiating off it, even in black and white. L.E. is wearing that stupid ten-gallon cowboy hat he always wore when he was drunk, ridiculous since he was a Yankee from Vermont, and I was wearing the red suit he’d given me extra money to buy. Puffy, thick red cotton, bouclé they called it, with black piping around all the edges and seams.
He said it made me look like a señorita.
I said it made me look like a piñata, after someone had swung a stick at it. Bruised and puffed up.
We brought back a piñata for the boys, and serapes, and sombreros, and balsa wood bull fighting sabers they almost poked each other’s eyes out with. Their hands would get sweaty playing with them, and the dye on the feathered crepe paper that was wrapped around the sticks would run off on their skin. They’d rub it on their little faces and …
Stop it.
Don’t go there.
Every memory but the right one.
Every memory but the one I’m looking for.
Every memory that almost makes me wish I’d never become a mother in the first place, because it’s too painful remembering everything about them being alive and me being …
Just stop. Focus.
The shoes.
The red shoes.
My red shoes. L.E. had insisted I wear them to the bullfights in Mexico. I’d stepped in a bull patty, and they were never the same since. Try as I might to clean them, I could never completely get rid of the shit.
Now, let Rita take a whack at it.
I didn’t know if she’d know who I was—had L.E. shown her my picture, even told her about me? Had he shown her a picture of the boys to get her sympathy, tell her he was a widower, before he actually was?
That’s what I would do, to trap her: I’d work in Corey’s and Clarke’s school pictures, the little ones I carried around in my pocketbook. Clarke in his Carnaby Street paisley shirt I couldn’t get him out of, Corey in his red tee shirt and red-and-black sweater. I’d say I had to get the shoes cleaned up to wear to Clarke’s baptism. Bring God into it. That would get her going. Or shut her up. Or get her to leave my husband alone. Or get her to … I don’t know what. Just something. That’s what I was casting about for—just something.
I walked into Cobb’s Shoe Shop, a narrow storefront on Kentucky Street off the town square, two curved-glass display cases on either side of the door, the outside paneled with big dark maroon tiles. Almost cordovan, the shoe color, like an inside joke. But the once-white grouting was now dirty moss green, and there was a crack in one of the front windows, patched up with duct tape. I had my own shitty red shoes in a brown paper sack—the same kind L.E. carries his liquor bottles home in—and I thought, that’s what her shop smelled like. Alcohol. Rubs. Dyes. Chemicals. It would be hard to work there day in and day out and come out with your lungs intact. That made me feel sorry for her for about five seconds before I remembered why I was there.
“I’ve got this problem, and I don’t know if you can help me.”
“If it goes on your foot, I can fix it.”
“I don’t know what ever possessed me to buy a pair of red silk shoes in the first place, and then wear them to a bullfight …”
“A bullfight? Not around here I hope.”
“No, Mexico. With my husband. He won a prize.”
I looked at her, to see if there was any kind of recognition in her eyes. Nothing. Not yet. I could be any of the ladies in this sweet little middle-class town with a husband and a pair of red silk shoes.
“I stepped in this stuff—the boys call it dukie—I don’t know, maybe I should just throw them away … the shoes I mean, not the boys …”
I tried to laugh, but my energy was flagging, like it did so often in those days just before the end. I’d show up someplace and not remember why I was there. I’d just want to sit down. I’d just want to go to sleep.
“Honey, are you okay? It’s just a pair of shoes. Here, take a load off.” Rita shoved aside some old Courier-Gazettes and PennySavers on the worn leather chairs and gently helped me sit down. I looked around to get my bearings, and I saw, of all things, a pair of ice skates hanging over the door. Black, the laces fraying and splintered, just barely hanging on, but the blades still shiny and sharp. Rita saw me looking up at them.
“Oh, those were my husband Harold’s. One of the two things he loved most in the world. Ice skating.”
“What was the other one?”
“Drinking. And when he drank and skated at the same time …”
At least we had that one thing in common. Well, I guess we had my husband in common too.
“You should move those. What if they fall down and hurt somebody when they come in the door?
“That’s what I keep hoping for, honey, every morning. The one thing that could give me a day off. Is this gonna be my lucky day?” She was as sad as I was.
I sipped at the water Rita gave me from a water cooler. “That’s better.” I was trying to catch her—trying to do something—and there I was hearing her life story, which wasn’t so much different from mine, and falling apart on her. I didn’t even have the energy to open the bag of shoes; I just held it out to her.
Rita opened it. “Let’s see what we have here. Pretty shoes, although I don’t know if I can save that red. They might turn out more … purple after I’m done with ’em.”
I started saying more than I meant to, confessing myself instead of getting her to confess. “I never wanted those shoes in the first place. They were my husband’s idea. Believe me, I’m not the kind of woman who wears red silk shoes. I’m a schoolteacher. Now you, I could see you in a pair of red shoes …”
There was a flicker, for just a moment—both of us, eye to eye. “I mean, you’ve got some style, you keep your hair so nice, your makeup …”
“Nothing wrong with a pair of red shoes to lift your spirits.”
“They’re fairy-tale shoes. That’s all I mean. You know that story—Hans Christian Andersen? ‘The Red Shoes’? They changed it for the movie, but it’s really about this girl who dances so much she has to cut off her feet to stop, and all that’s left is a bloody stump. Stumps. The kids want me to read it to them after lunch. It’s all they want to hear. Bloody stumps.”
I started crying, in the shop of the woman who was sleeping with my husband.
“I hate them.” I’d never said that before, never even dared to think it.
Rita sat down next to me, on top of all those newspapers. She was going to get newsprint all over her dress. “Hate what?”
“Fairy tales, shoes, schoolkids … do you want them?”
“What? The shoes—or your schoolkids?” Rita laughed because she didn’t know what else to do. She’d probably never had a customer break down on her like this before.
“You know what? I should just go.”
“Wait. Whatta you want me to do with your shoes?”
“Why don’t you keep them? Go dancing in them.”
She watched me go. I could feel her eyes on my back. I could feel how pathetic she thought I was.
I opened my purse to get out a handkerchief to rub my eyes with, and that’s when I saw what else I had put in there to take with me to her shoe shop: L.E.’s gun.
— L.E. —
