Use Me

by Elissa Schappell

  Tell your husband, “My father wouldn’t die without me.”

  Remember the sound of the lock tumbling in the door when they left. Your father wouldn’t just slip out of your life like some thief.

  “He would wait,” you say. “He loves me,” you say, feeling yourself getting angry, light-headed with rage. Your husband says nothing. Your goddamn husband can’t even make small talk with you. He is driving eighty miles an hour, like it’s some kind of race.

  Insist that your husband pull into a rest stop so you can go to the bathroom and put on fresh lipstick so you’ll look pretty for your father. Look at yourself in the restroom’s warped mirror. Think, That is the face of a daughter. The fact that you can stop and urinate and put on lipstick is proof your father is alive. Press your lips together. You couldn’t do this if he were dead. As you cross the Pennsylvania state line, wonder, Did he just die? Think you are crazy. Wish you were the kind of person who is so sensitive she would know such a thing.

  You remember the sound of the lock tumbling in the door when they left.

  C. The Hospital

  Your mother meets you in the hall. She is wearing blue jeans, brown moccasins, and a short-sleeved orange sweater. You’ve always hated that orange sweater. Around her neck is the gold necklace your father bought her on their last trip to Thailand. It looks so yellow to you. Your mother takes your hands—she’s just had her nails done—she smiles at you, she looks sorry. Her eyes are red and swimming behind her glasses. Her mouth opens and she says, “Honey, your daddy is dead.”

  You fall to the floor. You are not a fainter, you are not a faller—what would your father, lying there in the next room, say?—but you lie there C-shaped on the cool floor, eyes closed, a snail. Your mother kneels beside you, you feel her hand on your hip. “Oh, honey,” she says. A nurse comes with smelling salts, the floor is moving under you, you don’t want to get up. Stand up. Hold on to your head as though it’s loose, a button barely hanging by a thread.

  “I’m sorry,” your mother says, wiping your eyes, “about the way he looks. I asked the doctors, I told them my daughter is coming, I don’t want her to see her father looking like this, but they said there wasn’t much they could do.”

  You see him in the bed. He’s twisted on his side, contorted in pain, his left arm reaches up over his head. His mouth hangs open. His head is tilted up. He looks frightened, like he’s trying to crawl away. His eyes are rolled up in his head, either in surprise or pain. You want to believe the look is the recognition of God, not agony and disbelief. You’re supposed to see his body and think this is some sign that he couldn’t wait for you—Look, he’s saying, my life was taken—but you can’t believe it.

  How could he leave without saying good-bye?

  Stand there and look at him. Touch his skin. Be surprised at how very cold he is. Just like they say in the movies. Pull the sheets up over his chest, under his chin. This is the first and last time you will ever tuck your father into bed. Kiss his forehead. Touch his cheek, it doesn’t feel like his cheek. Hate this. Stand for a second in the room. It’s big, just one bed, with a window looking out on a brick wall, swathed with orange and red curtains, a private dying room. Stand very still, see if you can feel his soul hovering in the room, some sense of spirit; Come to me now, you think, but there’s nothing there. Not one fucking thing. All you hear is the low roar of the air conditioner. The nurses are talking as you leave. As you pass, they say in unison, “We’re so sorry.”

  Don’t want them to feel bad for you.

  Your mother is wearing your father’s wedding ring under her wedding band. She’s also got his watch on, she’s wearing two watches, like she’s living in two separate time zones, the living and the dead.

  D. In the parking garage, the car won’t start. The battery is dead. Laugh. Realize the car just isn’t in park. Feel robbed of a good metaphor. There’s no fitting end to the anecdote.

  10. Home

  A. Your sister is waiting outside in the driveway. By the time your mother tracked her down your father was already gone. She has already been in the house and made up your parents’ bed, cleaned up the broken glass. She couldn’t stand to be in that house alone.

  Inside, you go through the house with your mother, a white tornado with a trash bag.

  “I want all this shit gone,” she says, throwing out can after can of Ensure vitamin shakes, all of his drugs and painkillers, morphine, hydrocodone, Valium, Gaviscon, Titralac, cortisone cream, Aveeno oatmeal bath, extra-extra-strong peppermints, it all goes into the trash, every goddamn thing that says cancer.

  Your mother throws out death. She bags it all up and carries it to the curb. It should weigh a ton. Your mother throws out death, but hours later there it is, still sitting out there by the road. You go outside, pick up the poisonous bag, and move it down the street to the edge of your neighbor’s driveway, where you leave it. You walk away. But you can’t do it. You drag the bag back up the street and leave it in front of your house, where it sits, looking cursed and lonely, until morning.

  A poll is taken and it is determined that no one has eaten in twelve hours, so you order a pizza, you order pepperoni with green peppers, which is your father’s favorite, and no one else’s. You pick all the pepperoni off, your sister pulls off the green peppers. Your mother isn’t hungry. Your father is dead and there is still pizza delivery. Wonder if you should have told the delivery boy your father just died; would he have given you a discount?

  B. People are drawn to the house like flies. They light down and sob. You cry with them for a while, listen while your mother recounts the day, the broken glass, the drive there—your father not speaking—how fast it all went wrong. You pour wine, you mix drinks, you pass out tissues. Be hugged, hug back. Find it interesting to see how different people look when they are crying. There are little bits of tissue clinging to your neighbor’s stubble. Your mother’s best friend has large purple splotches on her face, so her face resembles a globe with the African continent right between her eyes. Notice that some people look really terrible, while others are enhanced. As the people leave, they say: “Next time I’ll bring a meal.” “It’s so unreal.” “Take care of your mother.” “Anything you need, you call.” “There was no one in the world like your father.”

  No shit.

  C. Notice that out back, a white water lily has bloomed in the lower pond. Wonder if this is your father’s soul. How did it beat you home? Wish you believed all that psychic bullshit. Wish you believed anything. Stand out on the back deck your father built and wait, wait for him to show himself to you. To put his ghost hands on your shoulders. One last kiss. Did he not love you best?

  No. No he did not.

  D. Go down into the basement to be alone. Rest your head on the washing machine. See your father’s boots (boots you see on his feet when you imagine him, when you can imagine him) under the workbench, which is still scattered with tools left out mid-project, a bookcase for his almost-one-year-old granddaughter, your daughter. Your father made dollhouses, bird boxes, and chairs, but this bookcase, which would once have taken a weekend for him to bang together, was too much to accomplish in six months. Hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, a jeweler’s saw—his prints are on everything, but nothing holds any warmth. You wonder what he touched last. Is his smell anywhere in this house?

  E. When the people finally go, insist your mother take a Xanax so she can sleep. Put it in her mouth, lay it on her tongue, and make her swallow it with wine. She lets you lead her upstairs like a little kid. Sleep in your parents’ bed with your sister and mother, your legs all tangled together. Every time you wake up, your sister is awake and looking back at you. Do you look as empty as she does? You think about how you are sleeping on the same sheets your father slept on last night. You think that it is almost certain that your mother is going to die in the middle of the night. Perhaps from that pill you gave her. It could happen, couldn’t it? Keep checking her breathing. Kiss her forehead. Remember all those stories
you’ve heard about people in love dying within hours of each other. Think, There is no other couple as in love as my parents are. Were.

  F. When you wake, think, Every day for the rest of my life the first thing I will think when I wake is, My father is dead. My father is dead. My father is dead. It still doesn’t seem real. You say it out loud. “My father is dead.”

  You are a fatherless daughter.

  11. Here’s the Funeral

  A. Buy a dress at the mall suitable for a funeral, something dark and mournful but with flowers. Your father loved flowers. Buy a dress that feels disposable. You will never wear it again. When the salesman says, “That looks nice on you,” you say, “Does it matter?”

  B. Before the memorial service you go to the funeral home to see your father one last time. He looks like a stranger. He looks like his driver’s-license photo, only worse. His hair is brushed straight back and there is dirt under his nails from his bonsai class the night before. This would piss him off. He would hate being immortalized with dirt under his nails.

  Wonder: Would you rather remember him twisted in pain and horror in the hospital bed, or peaceful and plastic? Choose pain.

  Open a bottle of sake you’ve snuck in and make toasts to your father. Ask him, Dad, why aren’t you drinking? Laugh uproariously. One by one, step up to the casket to be alone one last time with your father, step up and say your good-byes. You stand there and think, Okay, this isn’t funny. Get up. How could you do this to me? How could you leave me alone in this world? I will never forgive you, you know that.

  On his chest place a box of sake, in his lapel an oncidium from his greenhouse, in his breast pocket his passport. In his coat pocket your mother hides a pair of her bikini underpants—she always used to pack a pair in his suitcase when he went on business trips.

  “You know, your father believed he was going on an incredible adventure,” she says, facing her children. “Death was just another trip.”

  Sure, except it’s one way and postcard delivery is a bitch.

  No one says anything.

  C. At the church, gather in the vestry and peek out the window at all the people filing up the walk and into the church, it’s like the pre-awards show for the Oscars. You don’t even know half of them, but they look important. Your mother is doing color commentary: Oh my gosh, I never thought they’d come. Well, how nice. That would make your father happy. She is touched. The minister says, “I can’t remember there ever being this many people here for a memorial service.” Think that he’s thinking, Especially somebody who rarely went to church. Think, Man, imagine if Dad was a churchgoer, we’d have packed this place.

  Stand and speak at the service. Talk about dancing with your father. You feel your father’s hands on your shoulders. Or want to feel them. Want to hear, You done good, kid. Think you hear it.

  D. At the reception at your house think how it was all the same people at your wedding. Your best friend, your father’s old lab partner. At some point in the evening, it’s hard to tell it’s a memorial service. Everyone is getting smashed. You hear stories. Your father was the best friend to so many people. Toasts are made, glasses are raised over and over to your father, a wine bottle is hurled off the back deck in his memory. Everybody stays too long, then goes home. There’s so much food.

  Sit on the kitchen floor and break plastic forks, spoons, and knives. Break every single one. Every time there’s a satisfying snap, and a satisfying sting; your palms are getting red. Your mother and sister laugh and leave you alone. Wish you’d broken all this plastic cutlery before the guests arrived.

  12. Ashes

  A. Have your father cremated without having any clue if this is what he wanted. Your parents never discussed this. Think this is odd. Think it makes sense. When you pick up his ashes at the crematorium, be shocked at how heavy the brass urn is. Say Urn, urn, urn…You sound like a constipated goat. Strap your father’s ashes into the backseat with the seat belt. Before you go into the liquor store, lock all the car doors and ask your mother, “Should we leave the radio on for Dad?”

  Be afraid to look at his ashes. Curious, but afraid.

  13. Home Is Where You Are

  A. You don’t need to think anything at all to cry, it just happens, caused by nothing, it’s a sickness, it’s organic to who you are, you cry. Some people have rashes, or tics, you cry, always, steadily. Asked to give one word to describe yourself, you say, Constant.

  If you stop remembering, you are afraid you will forget. You must be the constant daughter. You thought when your father died, you would die too. You have no plan for living with this.

  When people ask you, “How do you deal?,” joke, “Grief is like arsenic—you only swallow as much as you can without it killing you.”

  Your back aches, your arm is numb, you can’t breathe, you can’t hear, you have sores in your mouth, on your tongue, it hurts to swallow, you can barely lift your head, your pulse has slowed, you are sure you are dying. Your body is thrumming with disease.

  B. Take baths. Take baths at midnight. Notice in the tub that there is a delicate, almost infinitesimal spray of shit on your white shower curtain. Your father’s shit. You don’t ever want to wash that shower curtain. Wonder if this means you are some kind of freak. Smell the spot. Smell nothing.

  C. Don’t sleep. Watch nature shows. Just the late-night stuff. Animal-kingdom porn. Sex and death. Watch gazelles running as if in high heels across the Serengeti plains, watch the cheetah bob and weave, know the cheetah is going to win, watch anyway. Watch the gazelle stumble, get taken down hard and ripped apart like a sandwich. The blood on the cheetah’s mouth looks like lipstick. You like to see this.

  D. Feel so angry all the time, you think you could kill a man with your bare hands and a ballpoint pen.

  E. Wonder if that it-gets-better-after-a-year marker is really true.

  F. Try to read When Bad Things Happen to Good People, think it’s a bunch of shit. Get angrier.

  G. Ask God Questions

  “What the hell is your problem?” You could give him/ her a list of people who deserved to die. “Come on, you watch the news, you’re omnipotent, why him?”

  H. Ask Your Father Questions

  “What the hell is your problem? You don’t call. You don’t write. Didn’t you ever love me?”

  13. Ashes II

  A. You find yourself alone in your parents’ bedroom with the urn, which sits on your father’s nightstand. You sit on the side of the bed that your mother never sleeps on, indeed the side that never even gets untucked, so it must still feel as though there is a presence there, a lack of open space for a body to move into. No void. You pull the brass stopper out and peer inside. The brass casts a peachy light on the gray talcum-fine ash; the bits of burned white bone look like miniature marshmallows in pale cocoa. What would happen if you added water, would you get a paste? Some kind of cement?

  B. You can look at the ashes, you can shake them, you can touch your fingertip to a hill of ash and feel it cling there. You can wonder if your father would think this is sacrilegious, disgusting. If he would care at all. You think he would be displeased. Your heart is pounding as though you’re stealing, which perhaps you are. You can stick your hand down inside the urn, stick your index finger deep in the mound of ashes, right up to your knuckle. You wait to feel something. You want to feel something other than emptiness and pain. Before anyone can come upstairs and discover you with your hand in your father’s urn, you can pull out, rub your thumb and forefinger together, rub the ashes off the pads of your fingers and back into the urn where they, or he, belongs.

  No, no, you don’t do that.

  C. Instead you do this: you lick your finger and stick it deep in the urn, then you stick that finger, coated with your father’s ashes, into your mouth. You press that finger to your tongue and wait for it to kill you, but you don’t even gag. You swoon. The ashes are gritty as sand, they fill your mouth, then, as you swallow, they cling to the back of your throat. Little bits o
f bone grind between your teeth like boulders, then dissolve into a gray stripe on your tongue. Evidence. You wonder how you could ever explain this to anyone. Or explain that you want to keep doing it, you want to keep doing it to see if it keeps horrifying you. Maybe you will learn something this time. Maybe your pain will be replaced with something else. Maybe you will be saved. You plunge your hand back in, and hold him in your fist, you can’t get enough of his ashes in you. You shouldn’t be left alone with this urn. You cannot trust yourself not to eat the entire thing.

  IN HEAVEN, DEAD FATHERS NEVER STOP DANCING

  On the first anniversary of my father’s death, when the phone rang for the fourth time in an hour and the caller didn’t leave a message, it occurred to me that the caller was the boy I was flirting with earlier at the Cinnabon stand in the Christiana Mall. What could I say, I was starving.

  Luckily, my mother rarely answered the phone these days. When she did, and she got a salesman, she seemed to take delight in saying, “Mr. Wakefield can’t come to the phone—he’s dead.” “Mr. Wakefield isn’t interested in an Acapulco vacation, he’s dead.” “Mr. Wakefield can’t take part in the March of Dimes walkathon, he’s dead.”

  Was it possible? No. Maybe. Maybe that incredibly cute guy was calling me! My hands were all trembly, despite the Xanax I’d popped after getting home from the mall. I helped Billy buckle Annabelle in her car seat for a trip to the playground. Billy ought to be a hit with the local moms in his teal Hawaiian shirt, holey black jeans, and motorcycle boots, his dark hair standing up on top, still damp from the shower. He’d actually gone for a jog this morning. Anything to get away from us.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, as much out of habit as anything. He asked this so often he sounded tired out by it.

  “Go, have fun. Yes, I’ll be just fine here. I’m with my mother and sister, for heaven’s sake.” I kissed the top of Annabelle’s head ten times. “Your mother loves you. Give me a head bonk.” She leaned toward me and we bonked the top of our foreheads together.