by Toni Graham
Just after SueAnn rings up an elderly man’s purchase of tube socks and a two-pack of white boxer shorts, she sees that Holly from the grief support group is the next person in line. Funny, she had not really thought of Holly as someone who would shop at a bargain store—she’s from the West Coast and has always looked to be on the rich side. SueAnn feels the heat of a blush overtaking her neck and face. What is the proper protocol, she wonders, for greeting someone you know only from a therapy setting?
“SueAnn!” Holly says, “How nice to see you—especially away from the Suicide Club.” She laughs as giddily as the reformed drunks at the Bethel Baptist fellowship hall.
Taken aback by the flippant reference to the support group, SueAnn fumbles with the items she rings up for Holly: exfoliating towelettes, a corkscrew, a plastic bathtub duckie, a Steely Dan CD, and four scented candles. “That will be eight-seventy,” she says. “It’s nice to see you, too, Holly.”
Not knowing what else to say, as she bags Holly’s purchases, SueAnn asks, “Are you going to group tomorrow night?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Holly replies. “But there’s something else I’ve been wondering about. Are you planning to go to Tulsa to see the Belvedere dug up?”
SueAnn cannot imagine why Holly has asked her this, but she answers semi-truthfully: “I haven’t decided for sure.”
A heavyset woman wearing a cropped T-shirt bearing the phrase Oregon: the Beaver State has stepped in front of Holly and places a basket of items on the counter, so SueAnn only smiles as Holly says, “We’ll talk later,” and turns to leave.
What in the Sam Hill does an L.A. woman like Holly want to do with the Oklahoma centennial time capsule? If she was hinting that they ought to drive to Tulsa together, SueAnn is not sure what she thinks about the proposal. How do you feel about that? Dr. Jane might ask—the shrink’s default inquiry. I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel about anything.
“You might could get that took care of,” Belly Shirt says, pointing to SueAnn’s head.
SueAnn is mute, wondering what’s wrong with her head—or is it her hair?
“Your earlobes are nearly tore through,” the woman says. “The one on your right side is ninety-nine percent ripped out. That happened to my cousin—you need to get it fixed by a doctor.”
“Thank you,” SueAnn says. This answer is part of the Dollar Thrift-O employee policy: Just say thanks. But she feels her stomach eddy with resentment. Forgive me, God, for malicious feelings.
After the woman leaves, SueAnn touches her earlobes, fingering the long slits that used to be tiny holes. Twenty years of wearing heavy earrings have pulled down her earlobes, turning the pierced holes into unsightly slots, clefts that sometimes bead up with blood if she tries to wear earrings. She had not really realized that other people might notice. Good Lord, another body-maintenance chore; she does not need this.
“It’s about time to hit the hay, isn’t it?” Gilbert says.
SueAnn picks up her sewing basket and says, “I’ll be in as soon as I finish up with my mending.” If she plays her cards right, SueAnn can usually time things so that bedtime works out for her. If Gil begins yawning and seems as if he is ready to call it a night, she comes up with a chore she needs to do or a phone call she has to make. Though she says she’ll join him soon, she will not approach the bedroom until she is sure she hears him snoring. Conversely, if Gilbert goes out bowling with the guys, or if he is working on a project in the basement, she goes to bed early, and if she is not actually asleep when her husband comes to bed, she has learned how to seem asleep. Gilbert now goes off to the bedroom without saying anything more. She is ashamed that she has at times gone even further with her deception, every now and then pretending to have a yeast infection, drawing out the bogus malady for a week or two to avoid sexual contact.
At first, in the months after Kyle’s death, she figured her loss of desire was probably caused by grief. Then, when her doctor put her on an anti-depressant, he told SueAnn that sometimes antidepressants suppressed the libido. Gilbert pressed for sex the first few months of her loss of desire, followed by insults about menopausal women. The situation has plateaued so that now she has to deal with sexual issues only if she and Gilbert happen to go to bed at the same time—assuming he is not in a snit about the grief support group, in which case he turns his back to her.
SueAnn has considered that Gilbert could be correct—that the erotic time of her life has come and gone and she is now a dried-up crone. She has also entertained the thought that the antidepressant really has damped down her desire. But how to explain, then, the surge of heat she feels in her pelvis when she watches that Dr. McDreamy on TV or sees a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix before he went mental.
Suicide wreaks holy havoc on a survivor’s sexual life. SueAnn has not brought up “the problem” in her therapy group, even though Dave has been very upfront about his erectile dysfunction since his father died, and Holly has confessed to erotic cravings for her fiancé that have ghoulishly persisted beyond the grave. Clay just shakes his head grimly when asked about sex and will say nothing. For a while a twenty-two-year-old girl in the group, whose boyfriend had killed himself, was acting out sexually: going to the bars every night and finding herself in a strange bed nearly every morning. Once she even woke up in an alley behind a bar, barefooted and with her expensive cowboy boots missing. The girl quit the group after only three weeks.
Maybe, SueAnn tells herself, she will want Gilbert again, someday. Or maybe not, and then she will have to decide what to do about their marriage. She and Gilbert have been married for twenty-five years, and up until now he has always been someone she could lean on. Though his ripping up of Kyle’s suicide note wounded SueAnn, the fact is that he also made sure she did not have to see Kyle’s broken body, their son’s neck askew like the neck of a strangled chicken in her daddy’s barnyard. Gilbert had shut the garage door and shepherded SueAnn into the house, and while they waited for the emergency responders, Gilbert sat close to her on the davenport, his arm tight around her trembling shoulders.
She knows this particular memory shouldn’t be something she compares to Kyle’s death, but SueAnn still recalls when her cow dog, Louie, was run over in the road and killed. Gilbert buried him in a handmade box in the orchard behind their house and hammered a little wooden cross into the ground on Louie’s grave. She still loves her husband for that. Poor Gilbert: Kyle’s suicide has ravaged Gil’s life just as much as hers. The only difference is, he is still unaware that their former life is exactly that. The snoring starts; she can now go to bed.
The traffic in downtown Tulsa is heavy, and SueAnn hopes she does not rear-end someone’s car as she watches for street signs that will direct her to the turnpike back to Hope Springs. She is not accustomed to driving in the metro area, and she feels embarrassed to be driving a truck, as the folks in Tulsa seem mostly to be driving SUVs or tank-size sedans. She is making her way home after an afternoon visit to a plastic surgeon—something that is not available in Hope Springs. SueAnn was surprised, when she asked her family doctor about the torn earlobes, to be referred to the plastic surgeon. Turns out, the holes in her lobes could not just be sewn up. They had to first be reamed out, made even larger, followed by a stitching up of the new wound, which should heal over the original slits. If she wants to continue to wear ear wires, she will have to be re-pierced. There was no pain during the procedure, nor do her earlobes hurt now. But the surgeon taped square white bandages on each ear, and SueAnn now resembles her next door neighbor’s Great Dane after he had his ears docked. She does not look forward to the stares that will come her way tomorrow at the Dollar Thrift-O.
As she turns onto the road leading to the turnpike, she glances inside a car driving parallel to her truck, in the next lane over. A woman drives the sedan, and in the back sits a young-teen couple. The boy has his arm around the girl, who sits right next to him. A little date, SueAnn thinks, and the boy is too young to drive, so Mom takes them out. Gos
h, she had forgotten about the time she chauffeured Kyle and a girl on a date—Kyle’s first and only date, as far as she knows. It was a school dance during Kyle’s last year of middle school, and the thirteen-year-old Kyle had asked one of his classmates to be his date, a friendly strawberry-blond girl SueAnn saw again at Kyle’s funeral.
So when had Kyle decided he was gay? Did he have “dates” with boys that she was unaware of? Maybe an older boy who drove them somewhere. She cannot imagine such a thing. She has read about adolescent boys having mutual masturbation sessions—could there have been something like that?
Kyle and his date wanted to have dinner before the dance, so SueAnn had driven them to Siesta Sancho’s, where she took a table alone, a good distance away from the kids’ table for two. She was able to watch them as they studied their menus, talked, laughed, ate soft tacos and drank Cokes, and afterward she drove them to the school gymnasium and dropped them off for the dance.
Well, I’ll always have that. I was part of Kyle’s first date, and it was perfectly normal and very sweet—no signs of burgeoning homosexuality. Had he been having doubts that early? She will never know. SueAnn reaches into the truck’s cup holder, scooping up quarters for the road toll. Her earlobes have begun to throb painfully, and she feels them swelling up, as if two ripe peaches hang from her head.
SueAnn is first to arrive at the grief support group tonight, even before Dr. Jane. She sits down next to the chair where Clay usually sits; maybe he is stuck in traffic on his way from Ponca. Dave comes in a few moments later and sits across from SueAnn.
“Whoa! What the hell happened to you?” Dave says, pointing to the oblong tape covering the lobes of SueAnn’s ears.
“I had a procedure,” she responds, hoping Dave will leave things at that. She cannot help but feel as if she were wearing a dunce cap. At that moment Holly comes into the room. She glances at SueAnn’s bandaged ears and then looks politely away, saying hello before she sits down.
“Clay and Dr. Jane aren’t here yet?” Holly says. “The Suicide Club can’t go ahead without them.”
SueAnn says nothing, not wanting to draw further attention to her throbbing earlobes.
“How did you come up with the name Suicide Club, anyway?” Holly says.
“I didn’t invent the name,” Dave says. “There was a group in San Francisco called the Suicide Club.”
SueAnn is so astonished that she forgets her shyness about her Great Dane ears. “Are you joking?” she says.
“Oh no, no joke,” he says. “It started in the seventies out at San Francisco State. My best friend, Phil Shapiro, was one of the founding members. Actually, nowadays they call it the Cacophony Society—they changed the name.”
Holly says, “It’s a grief support group?”
“No no,” Dave says. “Nothing like that. It was a sort of guerilla-theater-type thing, if you’re old enough to remember Julian Beck. A bunch of artists who did capers and photographed them—sort of a cross between goofing off and performance art.” He adds, “There’s something similar now in New York. They call it Improv Everywhere.”
SueAnn is not sure she understands, exactly, but she can go on Google later. Holly nods, and at that moment Dr. Jane comes into the room, greeting them and taking her usual chair.
“Clay isn’t here?” Jane says.
“Not yet,” Dave says. “While we’re waiting, we’ve been talking about a group of artists in San Francisco—they called their association the Suicide Club.” He seems to recall that Jane is from San Francisco, and adds, “Do you remember them?”
Dr. Jane frowns and crosses her ankles, shakes her head no.
Dave turns again to Holly and SueAnn. “The odd thing is—and maybe this is one of the reasons they changed the name to Cacophony Society—Phil Shapiro actually did commit suicide, in the eighties, more than ten years after he was a grad student at S.F. State.”
No one says anything, but all SueAnn can think is, poor Dave. His best friend and his father both killed themselves. What kind of dark shadow follows him around? She has lived in Oklahoma long enough not to be surprised when lightning strikes more than once in the same place. And she has heard about something called the suicide spell, when people who have been exposed to suicide end up later doing the same thing themselves. SueAnn’s high school English teacher said the writer Ernest Hemingway’s father killed himself before Hemingway did, and after that a number of other members of the Hemingway family, about half a dozen, including his granddaughter, decades later. Clay enters the room, apologizing for being late, and SueAnn finds herself letting out a breath of what must be relief. Clay has not become another suicide statistic, is alive and well, even if tonight he looks a little gray around the gills.
“No, I’m not going—it’s a waste of time,” Gilbert says, turning up the volume on the Rangers game on the TV. “The thing will be all messed up, rusted out. No vehicle underground fifty years can survive.”
“I’ve been reading a lot about this in the paper,” SueAnn says. “The car’s in a vault—like a bank vault or an Egyptian tomb—it’s completely watertight.”
“Nothing is completely watertight,” Gilbert says. “And especially not something built in Tulsa fifty years ago. Why do you think they bury people above ground in New Orleans? Because bodies come floating up out of the ‘watertight vaults’ if they’re put underground.”
SueAnn wants to point out that Oklahoma is not below sea level like New Orleans. She does not care to argue at all about the Belvedere—she knows the car will be unharmed, gleaming gold, even now seeming futuristic in its aerodynamic design. If Gilbert will not go with her, she will simply take up Holly on the offer to drive to Tulsa for the unearthing ceremony. The fact is, she and Holly and Dave have begun to fraternize outside the group. Just this Wednesday they went to Sancho’s after group, drinking margaritas and sharing nachos, and it was then that Holly offered to drive. In one sense, it’s sad that now her only friends are fellow suicide victims, bound together by the worst sort of grief.
This Friday is the day of the Belvedere’s exhumation. She goes to the back of the house and into what used to be Kyle’s bedroom and calls Holly to confirm the trip to Tulsa.
Holly’s voice on her answering machine says drolly, “This is Holly. If you leave a message, maybe I’ll call you back.” At first SueAnn is taken aback, but then she realizes she prefers this message to the “You have a blessed day, now” that she so often hears on other answering machines in Hope Springs.
SueAnn leaves a message, then logs on to what used to be Kyle’s computer. Gil purged the hard disk long before, switched to broadband, and set up a new e-mail account. Nothing remains of their son save a discolored spot on the screen where Kyle had once stuck a Slayer sticker that Gil scraped off.
An impulse causes her to google the Suicide Club San Francisco, wondering if anything will pop up. The first site she clicks on displays a photo of what appears to be a membership card.
The Bearer
has agreed to get all worldly affairs in order,
to enter into the world of Chaos, cacophony & dark saturnalia,
to live each day as if it were the last,
and is a member in good standing of the
Suicide Club
She is surprised when numerous entries pop up. There is of course that whacked-out death cult in Japan, but what interests her is that the organization in San Francisco had nothing whatever to do with suicide. She reads that the group was formed in the late seventies by a guy named Gary Warne and two other guys who had a predilection for lighthearted practical jokes, though there is no mention of Dave’s friend Shapiro. The club developed into a group of people who performed street theater. Examples given include riding a cable car en masse, entirely naked. Another time they set up a small table in an elevator in a San Francisco business-district high rise, quickly setting a formal dinner service—complete with white linen and a floral centerpiece—and sitting down to dine on plates of garden salad ac
companied by glasses of wine. When the elevator opened on the ground floor of the building, a gaggle of stone-faced lawyers and stockbrokers stood stock still and staring.
She scrolls downward, reading a blurb by one of the founding members: “Have you ever explored a subterranean sewer at night with forty other people; climbed three storeys on a swinging rope ladder to dine on the roof of a condemned building; shared the surreal experience of being in a group of people scaling the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog?”
Another posting declares: “You may already be a member. Are you a: squeak in the door of normalcy; a dada clown rewiring the neural circuits of the community; a happy dog rolling on the carcass of preconceptions?” Maybe not, SueAnn thinks, but maybe I might have been, if I’d been born somewhere else. Heat sears her chest, along with a grim realization, something she has never before considered: Kyle would not have killed himself if he had been born in a place like San Francisco, a place of infinite possibility. She prints out the membership card and slips it into the pocket of her sweater.
She reads that the core of the group’s philosophy was inspired by the writer William Blake’s statement “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
“Have you heard about that new diet pill called Alli?” Holly says.
“I’ve seen it at Walmart,” SueAnn responds.
SueAnn sits in the passenger seat of Holly’s vintage Mustang convertible. They are driving to the metro to see the gold Belvedere dug up. There have been media reports that earlier this week during the digging process, workers made note of significant water leakage into the vault, and no one is sure how the Plymouth may have fared. Some surmise that the car will be barely blemished, while others predict little but a degraded hull. SueAnn is among the former group, believing that the Plymouth Belvedere will be as intact and golden as the day it was buried, whereas Holly is a glass-is-empty gal and has expressed her doubts.