by Diane Zinna
With those bags, and with the furniture from my childhood home, too long in storage but still bearing the smells of the things we cooked there, the stains, the dust and creases we’d made there, I moved into my first real apartment on my own.
And I remember that with all the white, white walls, the clean kitchen, the new carpeting, it felt alive and like it wanted to know me. That first night I ate pizza off a moving box while the walls swam around me. The apartment wanted to know my business. Who was I to be there? How had I arrived there? I went to the garbage bag full of old dresses and pulled out the black one with the satin collar. I opened the closet door fast and hung it up in the apartment’s mouth, shut the door again. Immediately, I felt more at ease. Now I could hang up my art prints and stick pretty shelf liner inside the kitchen cabinets. Now I could unpack the dishes. I carried grief like that black dress, and there were days that it was pressed into the back of the closet, and there were times I wore it many days in a row.
In that dress, I’d stood next to the twin closed caskets at the front of the room. There were no flowers. I couldn’t afford anything extra. My name had not been on their bank account. The small amount of money I would eventually inherit, the money that would keep me going, was tied up in probate. Their insurance was enough to cover plain coffins and cremation. The caskets didn’t need to be closed; I could not afford to line them. I was ashamed.
I didn’t put an obituary in the paper, but people came anyway. A co-worker of mine named Jessica stood next to me, trying to make me laugh the whole time, and the other people who were there looked at her disgustedly. The director of the funeral home told me where to position myself so that I could shake the hands of those who came offering sympathy, but thank God for Jessica and her jokes! When the director was not looking, we left the room and explored the funeral home. I tried the knob of the basement room where the director had showcased the coffins to me. I showed her the others I’d had to choose from. “You should have gotten pink ones with pink satin inside,” she said with a laugh, and rubbed her palm against them like she was a car model. She opened a drawer in a little side table and it was full of straight pins. She said, “They use these to pin the eyes closed!” And I laughed. My stomach muscles stretched and burned. It felt good to laugh. She had offered to take me out to eat sometime, but it never came to pass.
When all the people I worked with at the supermarket were gone, when my third-grade teacher, Ms. Roofson, who lived on the same street, was walking back home with her white pocketbook clutched against her hip, I went back into the viewing room alone.
It was a different place. There were suddenly flowers everywhere. The florist must have owed a favor to the funeral director. Or maybe he brought flowers over from the other viewing rooms, those services long done, those visitors already at their grave sites. One arrangement between the two coffins reminded me of the horseshoe of red roses presented at the end of a derby.
When the director came in to sit beside me, I went weak. I cried and shook my head and told him everything. I told him how I didn’t have any family. How I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know anything about money, about the house or the assets they had or did not have. I showed him an index card I’d been carrying with me—it was full of phone numbers of people others said I should call for help, and checked-off tasks, and tasks still to do, and ideas about next steps, the phone number for the morgue, where their bodies had stayed too long. The little card was soft from so many erasures and rubbing, and I told him that the morning after I got the call I was crying and suddenly felt my mother’s hand rubbing the back of my hand. And I got very still and didn’t open my eyes because I didn’t want to know I was just imagining it.
He was kind and put his hand on my shoulder. He smelled of the Vaseline in his hair. He told me I should bring some flowers home, so I did, walking mechanically back and forth from the room to my car, loading them up to the ceiling. When he told me to take one chrysanthemum from the top of each coffin to press into a Bible, I did exactly that. I was so grateful for someone telling me what I should do—I would have done anything he said.
When I couldn’t fit any more flowers into my car, I went back into the funeral home, and the director told me I should say goodbye to my parents. He left me alone. I felt like that was it, and I was running out of time. The white chrysanthemums spilling over their wooden caskets were already starting to brown around the edges.
I told them I loved them and not to worry about me, that I would find a way—like we were all in it together. I thanked them for sending me to that funeral home, for I felt that I had been sent there, and that the show of flowers and the funeral director’s kindness were proof that everything was going to work out, somehow. People would help me. I would get by on their kindness until I could find a way to get by on my own.
It wasn’t enough. I loved them so deeply. There was something else I needed to say to them, but I couldn’t figure it out. All the tasks listed on my index card—there hadn’t been time enough to prepare for this moment. As I stood there, I imagined my parents were flowers, growing in the direction of the light coming through the slits in their caskets, growing toward me as they waited for me to say the right words.
I couldn’t breathe. The scent of the flowers made the air so thin. I went into the hallway to catch my breath and found myself standing outside the funeral director’s office. He was on the telephone. He didn’t know I was there.
“She’s pitiful, really,” he said to his wife. And he said it was pathetic my mother and father had not planned for this eventuality. What eventuality? For this? He told her that he didn’t think I was ever going to make it. He told his wife that they had to do a better job by their daughter. I turned back to the viewing room and hurried to their caskets. I was shaking all over and put a hand on each one. The director had called me pitiful, and he’d blamed my parents for what had happened. Suddenly I couldn’t bear to leave their bodies in the director’s keeping. I wanted to see their faces. I thought if I could just see them again, maybe the words I needed to say would come spilling forth. If I’d had more time, I wouldn’t have been scared. I would have opened those coffins and gathered them up in my arms. But I heard the director coming, and I could not face him.
I said the only thing I could think in the moment. “I’ll come back.”
I rushed from the funeral home after that, not even remembering my sweater, where it was slung on a chair in the front row. I drove to our old house and cried.
I never went back. I never even drove past the funeral home again. A promise made to flowers, to wooden boxes. Sometimes I let myself believe the funeral director never put their bodies inside the caskets to begin with. And so, they could have been anyplace. I imagined one day I would open my bedroom door and their bodies would be laid out side by side upon my bed—oh, here they are, misplaced after all this time. My grief then felt like waiting, like it was just a matter of time before I found what had been lost.
I imagined Jessica telling the other supermarket cashiers about our jaunt through the basement of the funeral parlor, how weird it had been. I never returned to work there. I imagined my old teacher rooting through her white purse for a mint, telling people on a bus how strange it was that the coffins had been closed. Yes, how strange.
* * *
—
I WAS TERRIFIED someone would find out that I was living in the house alone. My parents didn’t have a will. Maybe they thought they didn’t need one because it was just us. I was eighteen. I didn’t know if I would be considered an adult or a child, and I didn’t trust anyone enough to ask. I lied to the neighbors. I said I had family taking care of me. I grew secretive about everything so I could keep living in the house.
I had their bodies cremated. Two weeks later, the director’s secretary came by my house with the urns tucked under her arms. As I struggled with bills and sold off more and more, I f
eared I’d soon be homeless and left carrying these heavy urns with me, that I’d never be free of their weight, that weight so great, heavier than I ever thought, not furniture, not comfort.
After the accident, people in the town started to talk about our house, about how it was starting to look disheveled. I heard they said, “It was a shame about those people, but the woman used to plant annuals, do you remember? It just brightened up the whole corner.” So I started planting my mother’s old palette of flowers, clouds and clouds of them. I painted the porch and repaired the gutter, which had been leaning from the house ever since a bad storm, when we lost power and a swarm of stinkbugs flew through the house like they were charged with lightning.
I started dating to fill the house. I hung a set of wind chimes that one man, so tall, walked into on the porch. They never sounded right again. Another sat in my father’s favorite chair and broke it, just like that.
Annie couldn’t stand the men. I would put her outside my bedroom, but she would just bark and bark. When they went through the hall to use the bathroom, she nipped at their feet. They would leave articles behind so often—a cap, a matchbook, a comb—and in the mornings, I’d go about looking for them, for if I saw them later in the day, if they caught me off guard, a man’s sock in Annie’s mouth, my heart would race with the panic of having been burglarized.
I had a game I always played with men. Tell me the first memory you think of when I say the word (blank). We’d go back and forth, trading words, sharing stories, and sooner or later they’d hit on a word that opened up a door in me and I’d be telling them something about my childhood. Never the accident. Never that I had no family now, but a release of small, honest pieces. And it would catch me off guard, how badly I wanted to be known.
A word can be like a cellar door. Just a few steps and you’re in a dark place. Some men quickly thought they loved me. I would start to care about them, too, but I knew I was engineering these bonds, and I felt guilty about it, weak and needy and dishonest. I wanted someone to hold me and to touch me, but so often I’d find myself frightened, in up to my neck with someone I hardly knew. They were often the ones who would not leave.
At night my hometown felt so large, so many people, so many men I’d never seen before, such a very good chance that this one, finally, hadn’t heard of the old people who’d drowned at Port Llewelyn, and maybe he’d just see me as a cool, kind girl. But during the day, the town felt oppressively small, the neighbors like zombies standing on my lawn, watching my house.
* * *
—
IT WENT ON that way for about a year. Then I found a Realtor to help me sell the house. I’d just sold my mother’s pretty copper pans, and the outlines of where they’d hung my entire life patterned the kitchen walls around us. She wanted to talk about nothing but the accident, and each time my answers to her questions were briefer, quieter, until the spool I was turning, turning, turning gathered up all the words into a tight, compact thing that I stuck away. She sold the house and some of its furnishings for me. I felt both grateful and unmoored.
When I finally went away to college, advisors asked how they could best support me, and I told them that I wanted to move into the family housing they reserved for graduate students. They all nodded and said, “Of course, of course,” like they would understand that I’d want to—what? Be close to any family? Even families that were not my own? I just wanted a place I could keep Annie with me. She and I moved onto the campus in what felt like a permanent way.
It was the sale of the house that made college possible. I went to the same school I had planned to attend before my parents’ accident, as though they could someday visit me there. I remember telling them how I had heard there were wind tunnels between the buildings and girls could just get whisked up by a gust.
Finally there, I would walk the campus longing to be caught adrift and sail away. But grief is a weight belt. I dedicated myself to my studies, taking summer sessions, multiple internships, extra jobs. I never went anywhere for holidays. I didn’t have any close friends then. I read so much.
I saw a psychologist at school. I knew I needed help. He said he was working on his thesis and had this idea that helping others could soothe one’s own grief, and he asked if I was open to meeting with people who had been in my situation. I said okay, and I had this private wish that the people he found for me would turn into friends. But when I went back, he said he couldn’t find anyone like me. He said, well, what good advice would you have given, if there had been someone else like you? He sat there staring at me with his fingers on his computer keys.
You leave the television on all the time to keep the ghosts from talking to you; you all stare at the set. You give things away and live in the smallest space possible to prevent memories from taking over. Whatever you do, don’t have a funeral. The people who come will remember the other people who came and assume that one of them is taking care of you, when they’re not. Everyone will remember the people in that room as close, when they’re not. They’re somewhere else tonight; their life has gone on, and yours has not. When holidays come, you date or you drink.
Before I left for school, I tried to open my parents’ urns. I banged on their lids like they were pickle jars, ran them under hot water, looked for seams in the brass. They were sealed shut.
I dropped the urns in a lake near my old high school.
When I let them go, and the urns left my hands, I felt like I would follow. I watched the shadow of the urns disappear under the muck. It was a mistake, returning them to water. Here on land, on a mantel, they could breathe. I imagined their lips up near the unopenable lids.
Some days I still fear a child will find them and roll them up onto the sand. Other times I imagine they are still falling, that the water was that deep.
Mine was still-falling grief, a sea with no floor. After ten years, I was still falling, feeling for the bottom with my feet.
What did my parents do in their last minute underwater? Did they hold hands? Position their mouths up to the ceiling of the car, for the last inch of air?
I tried to take solace in the idea that at least they were together when it happened. They loved each other so deeply. They never yelled at each other, and I hoped they didn’t blame each other at the end. What was that rule we always recited crossing bridges? If the car goes into the water, do we open the windows—yes or no? Did they wait to hit the bottom before deciding, realizing that they’d always expected the water to be shallower near the harbor? Did they watch fish go past?
They would never get to fade away. Even after I died, they would be on the bottom of that lake, brass ghosts. Pennies tossed in a deep, deep well, their end a plink and a reverb below the water.
The sound—the rush—of water folding over ears. No one left to listen. The grapes in the refrigerator, green and red—like shriveled finger pads in a white bowl. The fingers of strangers as they touched my parents’ things at the estate sale. A man, arguing with me that we should do it in my parents’ bed, me saying no, that we stay on the floor, the carpet burn against my back as he pushed into me, the four circular scars it left on my skin. That man, the first one, smoked in my parents’ bed while I stuffed my bloodstained underwear into the bottom of the garbage can and twisted in front of the mirror to see where my back was scraped—he terrified me, and though I asked him again and again, he did not leave until morning.
These are the things I wanted to tell Siri that day. Instead, I told her about the green, splashy lights in the courtyard of my apartment building.
But the way she listened, I knew it would only be a matter of time before it all came out.
ONCE, A VIETNAMESE hairdresser who spoke choppy English asked me where my parents lived. Were they local? I told her that they were, and that Christmas with them had been great. I even made up a story about the presents I bought for them that year. My mother loved Chanel perfume. We g
ot my father a shirt. The bright, generous lies were born to fill the space, then floated away with my hair trimmings to the floor. The nice hairdresser was no worse for not knowing, and I’d been able to exit the conversation without having to describe their deaths and how devastating it had been. I lied to avoid questions that were only ever asked in pity or out of obligation. Sometimes people just open the wrong door without realizing they are in a scary funhouse at all.
There were lies like the ones I told to hairdressers, but there were others. Testing-the-water, cautious lies. There was a hot pipe of grief that jutted from my chest, and there were lies like light twists on its release valve. Early on in the semester when Siri was a student in my class, I used a story of my parents’ deaths to demonstrate how a comparison-and-contrast structure could be applied to a personal essay format. A-B, A-B, A-B.
My mother was A. Pacing in front of the room, I explained how she had died quickly: A. My father, on the other hand, had suffered over many years: B. My mother, sweet but obdurate, shunned doctors: A. My father was hospitalized all the final months of his life, and had even participated in a clinical trial: B. I hadn’t been able to say goodbye to my mother: A. I had been able to say goodbye to my father: B. Tack a hook onto the opening paragraph. In the conclusion, say something interesting about how A and B, though different, are really very similar. There—you have yourself an essay.
On the board, it looked like algebra. It was a good structure for the nonnative speakers to hang their new vocabulary upon. But in the front row, Siri sat with her mouth slightly agape and her pencil poised over the blank whiteness of her paper. I felt that she knew even then that it wasn’t the truth. But she saw through it, too, and knew that there was something I was trying to get out.