Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  “Yeah, so my dear husband buys this bug vacuum,” she said. “And has it shipped overnight to our house. Overnight! And he opens it right away, puts it together, and goes looking for bugs. Like he’s on safari.”

  “Was he wearing khaki?” I asked.

  “He should have been,” she said. “He could have ordered that from SkyMall, too.”

  More laughter from the gathered Christians.

  “So he finds this big spider in his man cave in the basement,” she said. “One of those scary ones that look like a piece of popcorn. It’s on the ceiling, but the ceiling is low, seven feet high, so my husband puts on the extenders. He’s standing thirty feet away from the spider. Thirty!”

  The Christians howled.

  “So he sucks that thing up. And runs to the front door, flings it open with one hand, and runs out to the street. I follow him out and I see him trying to reverse the vacuum so it shoots that spider out instead of sucking it in. But he does something wrong, so the whole thing falls apart. The extensions drop off and the storage chamber thing is open and the spider comes roaring out and jumps onto his shirt.”

  Her husband smiled. It wasn’t real.

  “And he starts screaming. This high-pitched wail that sounds like a nine-year-old girl. And he’s jumping around trying to knock that spider off his shirt. He’s slapping his chest trying to smash it. And then it crawls up onto his neck and his face. And, there he is, my tough husband, slapping his own face trying to kill a spider. And then he gets it. So he has giant dead popcorn spider all over his chin.”

  The Christians applauded. I wondered how often she told stories that humiliated her husband. And I realized that her meanness made her more attractive. It was my turn to cross my legs.

  “Can you believe my husband?” she asked. “Afraid of spiders.”

  She laughed, shook her head, and put her hand on my thigh. Women often touch other people during conversation. Women enjoy that slight affection but it’s always a touch to a safe area: knee, elbow, shoulder. Touching a joint is a polite way to establish connection. There are fewer nerves. If you want to stay friendly, touch the place with the fewest nerves. But that woman touched my thigh with her whole hand and squeezed just a bit, and it was high enough up my thigh to be on the border between “Friendly Female Gesture” and “Do You Want a Hand Job?”

  I looked around the room, but nearly everybody, my wife included, was too busy laughing to have noticed the thigh grab. Of course, the husband had noticed. And he stared at me with such a blank look, I couldn’t read him. I didn’t know what he was thinking. But I immodestly knew I’d always been the alpha male in any room and he’d probably always been the omega. His wife had chosen to flirt with me and insult her husband. And I still hadn’t bothered to look at my wife. Jesus, I felt like I was having a swift and very public affair.

  And then, I saw real emotion in the husband. A flash of pain. Male vanity is so sad because it goes against our macho training and does not receive much sympathy from anybody. I bully myself when I am in periods of male vanity.

  And now the other folks began to tell stories, none of them particularly interesting or cruel, and they prayed together. I opened my eyes and stared at the woman. I fought the urge to reach out and touch her prosthetic limb. I wanted to prove to her that I wasn’t afraid of her disability, that I could be affectionate about it. I wanted to whisper in her ear and tell her that her thigh touch had made me shudder, and that if she had moved her hand ever so slightly, I would have orgasmed.

  And I kept thinking such sinful thoughts until they ended their prayer.

  “Oh, wait,” she said to me. “We’re having a career day for the third graders at my school next week. You have to come. Every kid loves a fireman. Give me your e-mail address so I can send you an official invitation. To come speak.”

  But it felt like an official invitation to commit adultery. Or maybe I was just fooling myself. Maybe she was just a flirt. Maybe she was one of those repressed Christian women who are blind to their own sexuality. Maybe she wasn’t aware that she’d touched my thigh.

  I looked at my wife for the first time but she was talking to another woman and there were no signs that she felt threatened, that she’d even been aware of what was (or wasn’t) happening.

  “Will you come to my school?” the wife asked. “You have to come.”

  “I’m kind of an asshole,” I said. “I’m really not appropriate for third graders.”

  Then, because I’d driven myself to the party, straight from work, I made excuses that I had to fill in for a sick guy and work the graveyard shift.

  “It’s a firefighter’s life,” I said. “Always on call.”

  My wife looked at me and smiled. She knew I was lying about work, but I assumed she thought I was just fleeing the fundamentalists. I don’t think she was aware that I was fleeing temptation. She was unaware that I was being an iron husband, strong and faithful.

  I said my goodbyes and hurried out the door and into my car. But I took the long way, around the lake, so I could think more about that woman. I promised myself that I’d only think about sex with her as long as it took me to get home. And I have mostly kept that promise. Mostly.

  So, damn.

  SALT

  I wrote the obituary for the obituaries editor. Her name was Lois Andrews. Breast cancer. She was only forty-five. One in eight women get breast cancer, an epidemic. Lois’s parents had died years earlier. Dad’s cigarettes kept their promises. Mom’s Parkinson’s shook her into the ground. Lois had no siblings and had never been married. No kids. No significant other at present. No significant others in recent memory. Nobody remembered meeting one of her others. Some wondered if there had been any others. Perhaps Lois had been that rarest of holy people, the secular and chaste nun. So, yes, her sexuality was a mystery often discussed but never solved. She had many friends. All of them worked at the paper.

  I wasn’t her friend, not really. I was only eighteen, a summer intern at the newspaper, moving from department to department as need and boredom required, and had only spent a few days working with Lois. But she’d left a note, a handwritten will and testament, with the editor in chief, and she’d named me as the person she wanted to write her obituary.

  “Why me?” I asked the chief. He was a bucket of pizza and beer tied to a broomstick.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s what she wanted.”

  “I didn’t even know her.”

  “She was a strange duck,” he said.

  I wanted to ask him how to tell the difference between strange and typical ducks. But he was a humorless white man with power, and I was a reservation Indian boy intern. I was to be admired for my ethnic tenacity but barely tolerated because of my callow youth.

  “I’ve never written an obituary by myself,” I said. During my hours at her desk, Lois had carefully supervised my work.

  “It may seem bureaucratic and formal,” she’d said. “But we have to be perfect. This is a sacred thing. We have to do this perfectly.”

  “Come on,” the chief said. “What did you do when you were working with her? She taught you how to write one, didn’t she?”

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “Just do your best,” he said and handed me her note. It was short, rather brutal, and witty. She didn’t want any ceremony. She didn’t want a moment of silence. Or a moment of indistinct noise, either. And she didn’t want anybody to gather at a local bar and tell drunken stories about her because those stories would inevitably be romantic and false. And she’d rather be forgotten than inaccurately remembered. And she wanted me to write the obituary.

  It was an honor, I guess. It would have been difficult, maybe impossible, to write a good obituary about a woman I didn’t know. But she made it easy. She insisted in her letter that I use the standard fill-in-the-blanks form.

  “If it was good enough for others,” she’d written, “it is good enough for me.”

  A pragmatic and lonely woman, sure.
And serious about her work. But, trust me, she was able to tell jokes without insulting the dead. At least, not directly.

  That June, a few days before she went on the medical leave that she’d never return from, Lois had typed surveyed instead of survived in the obituary for a locally famous banker. That error made it past the copy editors and was printed: Mr. X is surveyed by his family and friends.

  Mr. X’s widow called Lois to ask about the odd word choice.

  “I’m sorry,” Lois said. She was mortified. It was the only serious typo of her career. “It was my error. It’s entirely my fault. I apologize. I will correct it for tomorrow’s issue.”

  “Oh, no, please don’t,” the widow said. “My husband would have loved it. He was a poet. Never published or anything like that. But he loved poems. And that word, survey—well, it might be accidental, but it’s poetry, I think. I mean, my husband would have been delighted to know that his family and friends were surveying him at the funeral.”

  And so a surprised and delighted Lois spent the rest of the day thinking of verbs that more accurately reflected our interactions with the dead.

  Mr. X is assailed by his family and friends.

  Mr. X is superseded by his family and friends.

  Mr. X is superimposed by his family and friends.

  Mr. X is sensationalized by his family and friends.

  Mr. X is shadowboxed by his family and friends.

  Lois laughed as she composed her imaginary obituaries. I’d never seen her laugh that much, and I suspected that very few people had seen her react that strongly to anything. She wasn’t remote or strained, she was just private. And so her laughter—her public joy—was frankly erotic. Though I’d always thought of her as a sexy librarian—with her wire-rimmed glasses and curly brown hair and serious panty hose and suits—I’d never really thought of going to bed with her. Not to any serious degree. I was eighteen, so I fantasized about having sex with nearly every woman I saw, but I hadn’t obsessed about Lois. Not really. I’d certainly noticed that her calves were a miracle of muscle—her best feature—but I’d only occasionally thought of kissing my way up and down her legs. But at that moment, as she laughed about death, I had to shift my legs to hide my erection.

  “Hey, kid,” she said, “when you die, how do you want your friends and family to remember you?”

  “Jeez,” I said. “I don’t want to think about that stuff. I’m eighteen.”

  “Oh, so young,” she said. “So young and handsome. You’re going to be very popular with the college girls.”

  I almost whimpered. But I froze, knowing that the slightest movement, the softest brush of my pants against my skin, would cause me to orgasm.

  Forgive me, I was only a kid.

  “Ah, look at you,” Lois said. “You’re blushing.”

  And so I grabbed a random file off her desk and ran. I made my escape. But, oh, I was in love with the obituaries editor. And she—well, she taught me how to write an obituary.

  And so this is how I wrote hers:

  Lois Andrews, age 45, of Spokane, died Friday, August 24, 1985, at Sacred Heart Hospital.

  There will be no funeral service. She donated her body to Washington State University. An only child, Lois Anne Andrews was born January 16, 1940, at Sacred Heart Hospital, to Martin and Betsy (Harrison) Andrews. She never married. She was the obituaries editor at the Spokesman-Review for twenty-two years. She is survived by her friends and colleagues at the newspaper.

  Yes, that was the story of her death. It was not enough. I felt morally compelled to write a few more sentences, as if those extra words would somehow compensate for what had been a brief and solitary life.

  I was also bothered that Lois had donated her body to science. Of course, her skin and organs would become training tools for doctors and scientists, and that was absolutely vital, but the whole process still felt disrespectful to me. I thought of her, dead and naked, lying on a gurney while dozens of students stuck their hands inside of her. It seemed—well, pornographic. But I also knew that my distaste was cultural.

  Indians respect dead bodies even more than live ones.

  Of course, I never said anything. I was young and frightened and craved respect and its ugly cousin, approval, so I did as I was told. And that’s why, five days after Lois’s death and a few minutes after the editor in chief had told me I would be writing the obituaries until they found “somebody official,” I found myself sitting at her desk.

  “What am I supposed to do first?” I asked the chief.

  “Well, she must have unfiled files and unwritten obits and unmailed letters.”

  “Okay, but where?”

  “I don’t know. It was her desk.”

  This was in the paper days, and Lois kept five tall filing cabinets stuffed with her job.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said, panicked.

  “Jesus, boy,” the editor in chief said. “If you want to be a journalist, you’ll have to work under pressure. Jesus. And this is hardly any pressure at all. All these people are dead. The dead will not pressure you.”

  I stared at him. I couldn’t believe what he was saying. He seemed so cruel. He was a cruel duck, that’s what he was.

  “Jesus,” he said yet again, and grabbed a folder off the top of the pile. “Start with this one.”

  He handed me the file and walked away. I wanted to shout at him that he’d said Jesus three times in less than fifteen seconds. I wasn’t a Christian and didn’t know much about the definition of blasphemy, but it seemed like he’d committed some kind of sin.

  But I kept my peace, opened the file, and read the handwritten letter inside. A woman had lost her husband. Heart attack. And she wanted to write the obituary and run his picture. She included her phone number. I figured it was okay to call her. So I did.

  “Hello?” she said. Her name was Mona.

  “Oh, hi,” I said. “I’m calling from the Spokesman-Review. About your—uh, late husband?”

  “Oh. Oh, did you get my letter? I’m so happy you called. I wasn’t sure if anybody down there would pay attention to me.”

  “This is sacred,” I said, remembering Lois’s lessons. “We take this very seriously.”

  “Oh, well, that’s good—that’s great—and, well, do you think it will be okay for me to write the obituary? I’m a good writer. And I’d love to run my husband’s photo—his name was Dean—I’d love to run his photo with the—with his—with my remembrance of him.”

  I had no idea if it was okay for her to write the obituary. And I believed that the newspaper generally ran only the photographs of famous dead people. But then I looked at the desktop and noticed Lois’s neatly written notes trapped beneath the glass. I gave praise for her organizational skills.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, scanning the notes. “Yes. Yes, it’s okay if you want to write the obituary yourself.”

  I paused and then read aloud the official response to such a request.

  “Because we understand, in your time of grieving, that you want your loved one to be honored with the perfect words—”

  “Oh, that’s lovely.”

  “—but, and we’re truly sorry about this, it will cost you extra,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, I didn’t know that. How much extra?”

  “Fifty dollars.”

  “Wow, that’s a lot of money.”

  “Yes,” I said. It was one-fifth of my monthly rent.

  “And how about running the photograph?” Mona asked. “How much extra does that cost?”

  “It depends on the size of the photo.”

  “How much is the smallest size?”

  “Fifty dollars, as well.”

  “So it will be one hundred dollars to do this for my husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know if I can afford it. I’m a retired schoolteacher on a fixed income.”

  “What did you teach?” I asked.

  “I taught elementary school—mostly seco
nd grade—at Meadow Hills for forty-five years. I taught three generations.” She was proud, even boastful. “I’ll have you know that I taught the grandchildren of three of my original students.”

  “Well, listen,” I said, making an immediate and inappropriate decision to fuck the duck in chief. “We have a special rate for—uh, retired public employees. So the rate for your own obituary and your husband’s photograph is—uh, let’s say twenty dollars. Does that sound okay?”

  “Twenty dollars? Twenty dollars? I can do twenty dollars. Yes, that’s lovely. Oh, thank you, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, ma’am. So—uh, tell me, when do you want this to run?”

  “Well, I told my daughters and sons that it would run tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes, the funeral is tomorrow. I really want this to run on the same day. Is that okay? Will that be possible?”

  I had no idea if it was possible. “Let me talk to the boys down in the print room,” I said, as if I knew them. “And I’ll call you back in a few minutes, okay?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, I’ll be waiting by the phone.”

  We said our good-byes and I slumped in my chair. In Lois’s chair. What had I done? I’d made a promise I could not keep. I counted to one hundred, trying to find a cool center, and walked over to the chief’s office.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I think I screwed up.”

  “Well, isn’t that a surprise,” he said. I wanted to punch the sarcasm out of his throat.

  “This woman—her husband died,” I said. “And she wanted to write the obituary and run his photo—”

  “That costs extra.”

  “I know. I read that on Lois’s desk. But I read incorrectly, I think.”

  “How incorrectly?”

  “Well, I think it’s supposed to cost, like, one hundred dollars to run the obit and the size photo she wants—”