by Kris Radish
By the time the first boarding call for the plane to Albuquerque is announced, the four women have all touched each other and recognized details of their common-denominator lives. Wives, mothers, daughters, lovers, friends—they begin to discover each other with small hints of hesitation and with their red shoes tapping quietly in anticipation about what is now starting to happen, and then Laura rises before anyone else to make a short presentation.
“Ladies, just a second, please,” Laura says, with her feet spread and her hands on her hips and the flaps of her denim vest whipping back and forth as she shakes her head. “You know how at funerals when you get in your car and drive from the church to the cemetery they put little flags on all the cars so no one can break in and traffic stops and everything?”
They know. They have all been to dozens of funerals. The mere mention of the processions makes fifteen stories rise between them but they bat them down, pressing hard, so they can focus on what Laura is about to say.
“Well, this traveling funeral of Annie’s already has the red-shoe thing going on and by the way, Katherine, first stop, you get a pair.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Katherine responds with a salute.
“So our traveling funeral needs a flag. I have red bandanas, kind of the do-rag of the funeral set, if you care to think of it that way. We can wear them any way we like or keep them in our pockets but it will be our little funeral flag.”
The women whistle and clap as Laura hands each one of them a red bandana and then they tie them to necks, heads, arms.
Then they rise from their chairs, past the bottle-balancing bartender and elderly women who point to them and say, “Aren’t they cute?” and toward the waiting airplane where they have been booked into first class by Annie G. Freeman for the very first time in every single one of their lives.
13
* * *
Laura finalizes her writing idea in midair as she is stretching her legs like she has never before stretched her legs on an airplane flight. She pushes her legs out in front of her to their full length, looks at her own hands to see if she is really alive and flying first-class, and then turns to Jill and realizes at that second that someone has to take notes.
“What are we thinking?”
Laura looks at her as if a bird has just flown out of her left ear. She’s spent so much time alone the past several months that human spontaneity comes at her as if she is being sucked into some kind of wild vortex. The immediate intimacy of spending all these days with women she barely knows, twenty-four hours a day, almost every minute, pretty much constantly, has upset what she has left of her life’s balance.
“Laura, are you talking to me?”
“Of course I am talking to you,” she says, gesturing with her hands as if she is holding an invisible basketball that she doesn’t know what to do with next. “I just got this idea.”
“Why does this not surprise me?” Jill asks, placing her hand on top of the imaginary basketball. “But aren’t you the one who is supposed to know what we are thinking?”
Laura laughs and drops the ball, resting her hands on her lap and smiling as if she has just won the game.
“It’s not quite like that, Jill. I’m intuitive. I can turn it on or off or not talk about it or see things. It’s dicey. It depends on where my mind is.”
There is a moment of silence. Both women, both fine minds, are thinking.
“Jill, don’t worry. I can’t get inside of your head if you don’t want me to get inside of your head. What the hell is in there anyway?”
Jill laughs and realizes that this may be the first time she has bantered intelligently since the beginning of her retirement and she feels as if she is back leaning against the hall outside of the administration building and immersed in one of her much loved intellectual discussions. She loves Laura’s quick wit, the way she talks in circles but jumps back to something remarkable just when you think it may be time for another dose of medication, the way she just says whatever pops into her head as if there was absolutely no way at all to do anything else.
While Laura begins to outline her plan, they can hear Katherine and Rebecca behind them talking nonstop. Their conversation floats across the top of the seats and hovers around them like the very airplane they are riding inside on the way to New Mexico. Jill thinks of it as a tight cocoon, a weaving together of the voices and the bodies and spirits of the women who formed an important lifeline that kept Annie tethered to the reality of where she had been and where she was and where she was headed. Jill wonders if Annie knew how their lives and voices would blend, what they would argue about, who would listen and who always wanted to talk.
“Listen,” Laura explains, grabbing the ball again and running with it at full speed. “Annie was a writer and a teacher and she’d love it if we did some kind of funky memorial as part of the traveling funeral that included our own funeral thoughts.”
“Funeral thoughts?” Jill asks.
“Funeral thoughts, yes. Like remembering moments and how you felt and what happened because of a funeral, any funeral, a death, something funeral-like. Or not. It could be about Annie or anything.”
“Do you remember the first time you thought about death?” Jill asks her, pulling back through the weeds of her life and memories to try to find her own earliest funeral memory.
Laura pauses. She sets her ball down between her legs for a moment and rests her hands on the top of her legs and says the words “My grandma.”
The story is a little girl’s story. A phone ringing late at night and a father driving off to a hospital.
No one sleeps and then another call so late in the night Laura remembers it as the first time she saw daylight breaking across the sky and shedding streams of light from horizon to tree to house to street in a way she had never imagined or seen it before.
“I had no idea what was going on, something bad, I remember thinking, and when I saw the sun coming up I ran to find my mother and told her something like ‘Mom, the sky looks like it’s crying light,’ and my mother was crying. She was crying and she took me into her lap and held me close like she did, or I imagined she did, when I was a baby and rocked me back and forth for what seemed like a very long time for a little girl.”
Later, Laura tells her, when she found out her grandma had died and she was caught up in a swirl of tears and baking and phone calls and people coming and going, her next memory came from the funeral home.
“It smelled horrible,” she said. “I remember putting my little white gloves up to my face to smell the perfume I had on them and then sitting on a long, hard bench. I lifted my head and saw that everyone was crying. My aunties, my mom, my Uncle Bart. Some of them were crying hard and loud and I thought that I was supposed to cry too. So I cried, but I had absolutely no idea what any of it meant.”
Jill tells Laura it is hard for her to push back through the sixty-plus years of her memories to recall the first time she remembers a death, someone dying. An uncle, maybe, she shares with Laura. Jill holds her thoughts still, afraid just a bit, that even though Laura claims not to be able to get inside of her mind, she really can.
“I can’t remember much,” she says shrugging her shoulders and turning away to look at the seat back in front of her. “Grief gets worse, you know that, as you get older and you actually have a relationship with someone.”
Eventually they waltz their way back from childhood funerals to Laura’s great idea. Instead of the usual “I was here at the funeral and no one really cares” book that rests close to the front door of funeral homes, she suggests something more “Annie-like.”
“Like what?” Jill asks.
“I was thinking that we’d create a kind of roving funeral book. Like right now I would write down whatever I am thinking about and then write something that Annie would have thought or felt or a memory of her that might be passing through my mind at the same time.”
Jill thinks for a second and then says, “I like it. She’d like it too.”
“So let’s do it,” Laura says, making believe she has dropped her invisible ball and is now writing with a fine, soft pen. “Tell the girls.”
Jill tells Rebecca and Katherine, who agree it’s a grand idea and they also think it’s a grand idea to have Laura write the first installment of the funeral booklet. Rebecca throws a notebook over the top of the seat and a pen and when Laura opens up the book, she sees Annie Freeman—Born to Live already etched at the top of the page. Laura laughs and sends her unopened pack of pretzels, now considered a light meal in the airplane world, over her shoulder and announces that she is about to make the first entry.
And then she does.
* * *
LAURA THOUGHT: I am thinking now of Annie and then the next thought is of my blossoming friendships with these other women who also loved Annie and then I am thinking why didn’t anyone think about something like this sooner? Why can’t we have a funeral the way we want to have a funeral? Why don’t we have a funeral to celebrate the way we lived? Tradition be damned. The sadness of the loss needs to be honored and embraced, but for now I want to focus on celebrating. I sure as hell need to celebrate—and what better way to do it than with the women Annie loved the most?
* * *
ANNIE THOUGHT: Why aren’t they singing out loud? Why hasn’t someone ordered another Bloody Mary? Why haven’t they recruited three more members of the funeral procession? Why are they not dancing in the aisles? Live large, ladies, live large.
When she finished, Laura passed the notebook over to Jill. Jill laughed, looked over at Laura, grabbed the pen, and then began writing her own first installment. The book made the rounds and came back to Laura, who thus became the official keeper of the funeral booklet.
“Whenever you want it, holler,” she hollered herself. “And no fair cheating!”
The airplane moved through a small storm, bucked and swayed just a bit and then glided into a safe spot, a warm stream of air that took the women from the edge of their real lives and into the heart of Annie’s traveling funeral. When they had been into the trip almost two hours, everyone switched places. The noise from their intimate conversations was a slow rumble itself that quickly became the foundation for the funeral—kind, open, wide and honest.
They talked mostly about time during their first long conversation. Time for themselves, time away, time that might have to be made up later if such a thing were possible. They reached in and felt around the edges of their new friendships, or what they hoped would be friendships, and they all marveled out loud at the way age sets you free instead of ties you down. Age, Jill said, relaxes you with the ease of the past, for when something like this happens, it allows you to dip back and to recall a time when you have already done this—mixed your life with someone who wasn’t a stranger but who was close to it. Age, Katherine said, gives you a cushion of knowledge, of knowing how grief will ride its hands along your spine, how something new does not have to be fearful, how whatever it is that the person you are sitting next to does that drives you a little batty cannot be as bad as that one time when something with someone else was really bad.
They promised each other to try not to worry, to try and lean into the traveling funeral in a way that would be honest, not too offensive. To try and let go as much as womanly possible in the midst of a traveling funeral when the world was hovering behind them waiting, always waiting, for each of them to return.
The Albuquerque airport was quiet at noon on a Monday. Business travelers had already landed and were by now halfway through their morning meetings, vacationers were already sipping beer at the hotel swimming pools, and the airport personnel were busy trying to look busy. When the four women paraded through the airport in their red tennis shoes and bandanas, they looked as if they were headed toward a funky Santa Fe women’s retreat and they blended in with the New Mexico crowd as if they knew exactly where they were going and what they were doing.
Annie had ordered them a red Jeep Cherokee. Limited luggage space, a sunroof, room for four—barely—and a spot to put Marie’s cell phone right between the passenger and driver and Marie, too, in case she happened to show up. It did not take them long to throw their luggage into the Jeep—one bag each—and drive out into a new landscape, a stark hunk of desert that made them all take a deep breath and exclaim, “Oh my God, this is beautiful.”
And it was beautiful, especially as they drove past the sprawling city of Albuquerque, where time and people had taken up one section of bare earth and then another and another, transforming it into a mass of clay roofs and patches of green and gated communities to protect what they thought was their private piece of serenity.
“I haven’t been here for like twenty years,” said Katherine. “I can’t believe how much this city has grown and reached outside to cover all these hills and mesas and every piece of flat land up to the river, over it and to the edge of the mountains.”
“Does anyone know when Annie was here? Does anyone know what happened to her here?” Rebecca asked in response.
“Not me. I saw old photographs in her house of some desert scene, someone in the background, but I don’t remember ever hearing her talk about Santa Fe or New Mexico or anything about this part of the world,” Jill said. “She did keep a red rock on her desk. Sometimes when I knew she’d had a particularly tough day or student, she’d pick up that rock and hold it in her hand, rub it between her fingers, sometimes put it to her lips. It’s a clue. Maybe it’s a clue.”
“Well,” Katherine responded, “here’s something.”
She’s holding up a cassette tape. It is black and has red writing on the front.
“What is that?” asks Laura.
“I have no idea. It was part of a package that was delivered from her son Nick last week. It was delivered with instructions that I not open it until the night before the trip and what was inside was a tape for each step of the journey.”
“What the shit,” Rebecca says, using the word “shit” like someone else would use the word “heck.” “Was there anything else in the package?”
“No,” Katherine says, making a wide turn into the freeway that will take them from Albuquerque, past miles of row houses that look as if they all came out of the same cereal box and sprawling neighborhoods pointed toward Santa Fe. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if other packages show up along the way. Remember she has everything planned and picked out. Which is exactly what I intend to do for my own funeral the second we get back.”
Laura laughs before Katherine can put in the tape. It is infectious, a wild virus that latches onto each one of them and refuses to let go and so they all laugh, not certain why, but the sound of gorgeous laughter distracts them from the tape for just a second.
“What,” Jill finally asks, “are you laughing about?”
“I’ll have to cancel my life and spend all my time going on these goddamned traveling funerals. I can see it now. A whole cottage industry springing up for travel agents and writers and all those people in Hawaii who plan those weddings that everyone thinks are so special but are really just like every other wedding in the whole world. It will be a whole new career opportunity for someone.”
“The tape, for crying out loud,” Jill shouts above the new laughter. “Put in the damn tape.”
Katherine obeys and slips in the tape quickly even though they are still laughing. She keeps her fingers on the edge of it, as if she were holding on to the fingers of her daughter who is leaving for the very first day of school. Katherine holds on and keeps her fingertips on the dashboard as they hear Annie Freeman’s voice and they drive toward Santa Fe on the first leg of her fabulous traveling funeral.
At first no one can move or speak and Katherine considers pulling off to the side of the freeway so she can focus on every word, every syllable, every sound from the voice of her dead friend that she hears coming from inside the radio.
“Shit,” Rebecca finally says as Annie Freeman welcomes them to her funeral.
Hey.
Did you all make it? I bet you did. I know Marie is probably holding someone’s hand right now but I hope she made it, but I know I can count on you all to have the kind of funeral for me that I want to have. This came to me fast. I would have had my own damn traveling funeral but there wasn’t time. I needed my strength to just breathe and so I am counting on you, counting on all five of you.
My boys helped me plan all of this. It was their penance, I told them, for all the times they were little shitheads when they were growing up. Everything should be in order and there are enough tapes in here for every stop to help you figure out what happened and what I need to have happen now—this one last time.
And women: Please do not be too morose. That would piss me off. I know it must be weird to hear my voice now, to have me lecture you one last time, but think of this as many things and one of them should be to have a damn good time and to get to know the women I loved, the women who you may also come to love during this interesting assignment. And for godsakes try and get along. Katherine, don’t be too damn bossy. Jill, get on with it and don’t sulk. Laura, it’s way beyond time to get going and move—and I mean really move on. Rebecca, I’m sorry, honey, about all the loss and death but you can do it, you can. Marie, if you are there, it’s okay, baby, as you would say, to stop and give the baton to someone else once in a while.