Afterwards, we swore we’d do it again in five years, and every five years after that. To remember Rob, but also to remember us.
It never happened. Life became too complicated, too busy.
But because of the pre-funeral, I know a few things you don’t usually know.
The last person to speak about me will be Tim. There will be laughter, a few tears. He’ll have a slideshow full of embarrassing shots of me as a child in a series of unfortunate outfits. He’ll remind everyone of the time I almost set the house on fire, how I’d succeeded in running the school mascot’s uniform up our high school’s flagpole, how I still thought I might make the PGA one day, or at least the Senior Tour. Then he’ll signal to someone and they’ll click to the next slide, and there I’ll be. My face projected through a bright stream of light, smiling, laughing, Rob and our friend Kevin on either side of me, gussied up in tuxedos for prom, awkwardly holding the corsages we’d bought for our dates.
Oh, God, we were young.
CHAPTER 13
Speechless
When Tim has finished speaking, he walks through the stream of light that’s projecting Jeff’s face onto the screen behind him. His shadow crosses Jeff’s younger smile, a momentary reprieve.
It’s such an odd place to be. Sitting in a pew at my husband’s funeral. My sister on one side, my son sitting rigid against me on the other, murmuring under his breath while he repeatedly smooths a piece of foolscap across his knees. The air smells like a botanical garden, and there’s a certain quality to the silence. Even what Seth’s wearing marks this day as different: grey flannel pants and a blue blazer. It’s his first almost-suit, something I’ll never make him wear again, like the dress I bought with Beth that is, as predicted, scratchy and uncomfortable.
I’ve heard Tim’s stories before, of course, first from Tim and then from Jeff. I knew Tim would be telling them because they told me all about that ridiculous event they insisted on having after their friend Rob died. The “pre-funeral,” Jeff called it, serious and laughing, trying to make me understand. And while I did understand what gave birth to it, I couldn’t support it. I laughed at the stories when they told them to me, but inside I felt nervous. Because if you attend your own funeral, if you know what everyone really thinks about you, if you are, essentially, at peace, don’t you tip the odds towards death? Maybe it was magical thinking, but I couldn’t help believing that if you were prepared for the worst, you might make it come true.
The miscarriage was one confirmation of my theory; Jeff’s death is the ultimate.
The person who first taught me to believe it is sitting next to Beth, and he’s barely spoken to me since he’s arrived.
Tim and I met during our first year of law school when we both tried out for the annual fundraiser talent show.
My reason for being there was piano. Despite the crushing course load, I took an advanced orchestra class each semester. The music faculty made an exception for me, and that’s probably why, when the law school came calling for its yearly favour (someone who could play whatever music was needed), Professor Davenport offered me up.
I’d fulfilled the same role in high school when tryouts for the school plays were as much a popularity contest as they were about talent. I could sing and memorize lines, but the parts went to Beth and her friends, and the ones who replaced them at the top of the social pyramid when they left. I could sing in the chorus, or play the piano. I chose the latter, my back mostly to the audience, but at least I had my own minute of applause at the end of the evening.
That year the law school had decided to do a musical instead of the usual compilation of sketches, a revival of Guys and Dolls.
My usual early-for-everything-even-when-I-try-to-arrive-late programming brought me to the auditorium a full half-hour before I needed to be there. Most of the lights were off. There was a small spotlight focused on the stage, and the running lights that ran along the rows of red plush auditorium seating were on. The score, already half memorized, was tucked under my arm.
I walked down the aisle slowly, breathing in the mustiness left by a summer’s un-use.
What happened next was like in one of those movies aimed at women. The geeky background girl sees her opportunity to feel what it’s like (literally) to be in the spotlight, even though she isn’t the geeky girl anymore. Away from the queen bees, in this mostly new place, she has come into her own. She expresses her opinions. The boy/men don’t need to be drunk to approach her. Sometimes, she even approaches them.
But something about this place brings back memories. She places her music carefully on the piano and climbs the steps to the stage. She turns to the empty seats, shadowy in the half-light. She takes a deep breath and sings a plaintive love song, the love song from the show she’ll never audition for.
She gets lost in the music, her voice growing confident, the score she isn’t playing loud and bright in her mind. She nails it.
If only there was someone to hear her.
There is. The room is not empty. The music director is standing stage left. When she stops singing, there’s complete silence, followed by the sound of one person clapping. Startled, she blushes to her toes and turns, apologizing. No, don’t, he says. That was beautiful. What’s your name?
She gives it, and he writes it down. Oh, no, she says, I’m only here to play. He raises an eyebrow, but before he can say anything else, the doors burst open, a gaggle of giggling young women tumbling through them.
She backs into the dark, and when you next see her she’s sitting at her usual place, like Anne in Persuasion, ready to play for others’ amusement.
Cue the hero, who’s been dragged to the audition by his soccer buddies in his grey sweat shorts and a polo shirt whose collar is all stretched out. She recognizes the face sticking out of the polo shirt. He’s from her hometown, though she doubts he’ll remember her, if he looks at her. If he wasn’t so preoccupied with acting like he doesn’t want to be there. But he’s been caught singing in the shower after practice one time too many, and he’s been man-dared, mad-dogged-dared into it.
He waits his turn while she plays for the women with big egos and mediocre skills, for the serious guys who ignore the jocks’ catcalls. If she glances at him, in between the beats, she sees his foot tapping, keeping time. She speeds up to test if he really can keep time or if it’s a coincidence. He can, but the poor guy on stage can’t.
A voice barks from the audience to pay attention, and the blush is back, her face turned away permanently.
His name’s finally called. His friends are whistling and stamping, but he asks her to play “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” anyway, and when she does he sings it well and with confidence. His friends stop their carping, respect creeping in. That respect snakes around the room and up to the music director, cast in his half shadow, as he should be.
It’s no surprise when, a week later, she checks the cast list out of curiosity (she tells herself) and there his name is next to the part of Guy Masterson. And she pretends to be surprised, though she isn’t really, when hers is set down for Adelaide, the missionary who falls in love with the gambler who eventually wants to change for his love of her.
She thinks, briefly, of turning it down, but fuck that, right? Fuck that.
They meet properly at the first rehearsal. She’s about to mention their hometown connection when he does it for her. She wasn’t as anonymous as she thought, after all.
In that first exchange there’s already an undercurrent of flirting. And by the time they sing the song she sang to get her here, long before opening night, they’re already in the love they are singing about.
The church organ is slightly off-key, something that makes me wince. Then the minister is speaking again, words that are meant to soothe, words I can’t really hear. Is it simply the usual platitudes, or something he really feels? He knew Jeff, knew him all his life. He married us, and chastised us on the occasions when we ran into him for not attending church. But he say
s that to everyone, so I can’t tell. I only know that the timbre of his voice is the same as it’s been every other time I’ve heard him speak at a funeral. The same cadence governs his speech, the rise and fall of his voice almost hypnotic. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s how you get through these terrible moments? Being lulled into the brief silences between old words.
Then he says a new word and I’m snatched from the somnambulant place I’ve been hiding.
“Seth,” he says. “Did you want to speak?”
My son nods silently next to me, his hand still smoothing the piece of foolscap resting on his knees. I put my hand on his arm.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“No,” he whispers. “I have to. For Dad.”
He stands up and walks towards the dais. He’s just tall enough to see over the pulpit, and reaches for the microphone to adjust it to his height. He’s about to grow tall like Jeff, but it’s going to come too late.
“My dad was the best dad,” he says, his voice cracking. “He was always … the best dad. I wish I could say more, for him, but I can’t. So, Dad, I hope you understand that if I was any good at saying what I really felt, this is what I would say.”
He looks up from his paper, and I wonder what he’s looking at, if he sees anything beyond his fear. His lips tremble and my heart breaks all over again. He’s not going to be able to do it, I think, half rising from my seat to go rescue him. But Beth holds me in place, and, after a moment, he bends his head and starts reading:
I don’t need my heart anymore,
you can have it.
Cut it out,
put it in a box,
bury it in the hard ground,
next to you.
My eyes are useless too.
They only show me a world
without you.
Colour blind,
colour absent,
colourless.
And my mind screams, Not fair!
Not right.
Not what I was promised
on the swing set
as you pushed me
towards the sun.
None of the stories you read me
schooled me for this.
I didn’t learn this lesson
in the moon,
or on the train,
or as a thing to be curious about.
So I don’t need my heart anymore,
you can have it.
Let it be buried,
in the hard ground,
next to you.
CHAPTER 14
Into the Middle Distance
I wake in my anonymous hotel room on the morning of Jeff’s funeral feeling closer to control, but not close enough. I need to punish my body into some sort of submission, something that’ll hold together through the funeral, the burial, the wake.
I call from the hotel room phone to check in with Brian and Zoey. They’re leaving for Nationals today, a five-hour drive in the opposite direction.
“I have a bad feeling about this one,” Zoey says, sounding uncharacteristically nervous.
“What do you mean, sweetheart? You’ll do great.”
“Dad’s been pacing all morning.”
“You know he gets nervous for you. We both do.”
“I flubbed that line last time.”
“What’s up, Zo? Really?”
“Nothing, I … Are you okay?”
I try to keep the catch out of my voice. “I’m just sad, that’s all. I’ll be thinking of you.”
“Dad wants to talk to you.”
“All right. Good luck.”
“Mom!”
“Sorry, sorry. Break a leg.”
She thunks the phone down on the counter and yells for Brian. A few more clunks and he picks up.
“I tried calling last night …”
“Yeah, sorry. I realized this morning my cell phone was dead. I forgot to charge it.”
“Got it. How is it there?”
“It looks a lot like here. Sans mountains.”
“No, I meant … Zoey seems to be freaking out.”
“Yeah, she kind of said. Look, if she doesn’t want to go, don’t make her, okay?”
“Don’t forget your knapsack, Zo. What? No, no, she wants to go. God, can you believe it, but I think it’s about a boy.”
I looked out the window at the colourless sky. A boy. A boy.
“Our Zoey?”
He chuckled. “Who would’ve thunk it?”
“Do we know this boy?”
“That Zuckerman kid, maybe.”
“Zuckerberg? The one from the western region?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“Why him?”
“Not sure. He seems like the most likely candidate.”
“Mmm. Well, hopefully it’ll all blow over. Or maybe you can ask her on the drive?”
“I think that’s your territory.”
A reproach. If I were where I should be, I could ask her myself.
“Make sure she’s got enough warm clothes.”
“It’s coming on summer here. Like someone flipped a switch overnight.”
Not here. Not here.
“Drive safe, then.”
“Will do. Check in later?”
“Yes.”
We hang up and I flip through the town directory kept helpfully next to the telephone until I find what I need. A public golf course that isn’t connected with Jeff as far as I know. I call to check if they’re open, and when they say they are, I pull together a passable outfit and ask for directions from the twenty-something at the front desk.
“Cold day for golf,” she says in the local twang that sometimes crept into Jeff’s voice, the words slowed down, like the batteries running out on a music player.
The course is a twenty-minute walk away. The morning still holds the chill of the night I never saw. As directed, I walk along the local bike trail, still muddy from the just-gone snow. It was built on an old rail bed, and there are sections where the overhanging trees form a canopy that blocks out the weakly rising sun.
It ends at the golf course. The clubhouse and pro shop are deserted.
They’re happy for the business, renting me a bag full of semidecent clubs and giving me enough tokens for several hours’ worth of hitting. I sling the bag on my shoulder, feeling the familiar weight, steadying my body against it, and trudge over the bike path to the range. The pickets haven’t even been set up yet, and the ball machine groans like an old Coke machine that doesn’t want to give up its treasure. But eventually the balls fall into the rusty wire basket, and the one after that.
I take out my seven iron and tee up a ball. My first swings are as rusty as the ball basket, the shaft clanging against the ground, sending shudders of protest up my arms. Soon enough the rhythm returns, but not the hum. That blank-mind state that Brick’s searching for in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He used alcohol, but for me, that click from consciousness to only breathing, existing, comes from pushing myself as hard as I can physically.
I was counting on this today. I need it today, but it doesn’t come. Instead, all the memories, the conversations, the words said and unsaid stream in and speed up until I’m hyperventilating again, barely able to catch my breath.
I keep on as the tears start. I swing and I swing, and I wait and I wait, but I never get there, not in the first hour, or in the second either. My back screams, my knees complain, my stomach and shoulders throw out aches and pains, but I’m not stopping for anything.
In my sorrow I’ve found the drive I needed all those years ago.
I want that click, I need that click, and I’m going to keep swinging until I find it, or my body gives out beneath me.
Back at the hotel, I strip my sweat-saturated clothes from my body, and I do, finally, feel a sort of calm. I feel strong enough, anyway, to climb into the shower and stand under the scalding stream until my body is as red as my face.
The rest is mechanical. Drying my hair, hi
ding the dark circles under my eyes with concealer, pressing the black dress I pulled from the back of my closet, purchased for some forgotten event when I was a dress-size smaller. Or, at least, a dress-size smaller than I was last week; now the dress fits fine.
I get to the church almost an hour early. I’m never early for anything, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m early today.
The day has turned bright and sunny. I find a bench in a park nearby to sit on and stare into the middle distance. When I try to check the time on my phone, I realize I still haven’t charged it.
As I clutch the useless device in my hand I briefly consider pitching it into the duck pond glimmering a few feet away, but I stifle the impulse. Throwing it away isn’t going to change anything. Instead, I try to count the waves rippling gently against the pond’s edge, matching the slow thud of my heart.
When I’ve counted what feels like enough waves to fill up three hours, I walk slowly back to the church. Cars have arrived, the parking lot’s filling up, a fleet of black limos are parked in the circular drive. I reach into my purse to find the piece of paper torn from my notebook that I’d stashed there, full of words I can’t read aloud, but that I will, if able, place with Jeff.
My pupils contract in the vestibule. As I look down the long row of straight-backed pews, I know immediately that I’ll be denied this too. The casket’s lid is firmly shut, and in the minute it takes to register, I’m happy for it to be. I don’t need that kind of personal encounter, not with him, not with anyone.
I take a seat in the back row and dig into my purse again for something I will definitely need, the last Ativan in my possession. There’s a chance that in my current state it’ll put me into a semi-coma, but it’s the only way I’m going to survive the rest of today. I swallow the whole thing dry and am thankful when I start to feel its effects.
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