The Dead Do Not Improve

by Jay Caspian Kang

  Under the watchful eye of Doreen, the terminally thin, limping owner, Ellen tried on five different black dresses. Doreen kept fussing over the breadth of Ellen’s shoulders, noting that in her day, girls didn’t have four separate muscles in their arms, but after a good half hour, the three of us settled on an airy, lacy thing, a pair of black satin gloves, and a squared-off, almost Quakerish hat. For me, Doreen picked out a heavy wool suit with wide lapels, which she matched with a broad yellow power tie.

  I won’t mention how much it all cost, because that would ruin it, but as we were paying, Doreen told Ellen that a bright shade of lipstick was the key to looking good at a wedding, and, before the New England in Ellen could register a protest, Doreen grabbed her by the cheeks and smeared on a shade of red that would have made even Dolores Haze blush.

  8. The burial plot was atop a steeply banked hill. From the car, we could only see the outlines of three men, each one standing with his hands clasped behind his back. Before starting the vertical ascent, I looked over at Ellen and saw she was frowning, though not sadly. If I were to guess at it, I’d say that she was probably hating California and its modern, spacious cemeteries and the good weather that always accompanies a funeral. At least, that’s what I was thinking.

  Anyway. I grabbed Ellen’s hand, and we trundled up the hill.

  Up top, we saw a party on the verge of breakout. The three respectful men were, in fact, security guards. On the far edge of the plot, four scraggly dudes were fiddling around with a PA. A guitar and a drum set lay in the grass behind them. A stand-up bass had been propped up against a gravestone. Surrounding a folding table stocked with handles of Costco booze were six or seven men with fuck-you-Dad piercings—septa, cheeks, foreheads—and tribal facial tattoos. I counted seven, maybe fifteen dogs running around, yapping at one another, and at least twenty or so old hippies, each one dressed in his or her referential, Harold and Maude best, smiling and drinking out of red plastic cups. Around the hole and the chains and the crane, a circle of women took turns staple gunning daisies to the coffin. All the young women had been surgically enhanced. Just beyond the coffin stood a line of grim-faced Latino kids, each one of them around high school age. Other than me and Ellen and the security guards, they were the only people dressed in anything resembling funeral attire, and, like us, they seemed to not really have any idea of how to react to this particular morass.

  We hid behind the security guards. I couldn’t tell if Ellen’s hand was trembling in mine, or if mine was trembling in hers. But then she whispered, “Oh, my God,” and I followed her eyes and saw, at the end of the line of Latino youth, the glowering face of the Advanced Creative Writer.

  9. Our plausible scenario was fucked, but I couldn’t quite parse out whether it was fucked in a bad way. Before I could decide, a chubby bald man walked up to us with an offering of two red Dixie cups. I accepted mine and drank down half of whatever was inside. He smiled and said, “It’s just vodka and cranberry juice. Don’t worry.”

  Ellen smiled, tightly, and took the cup from the bald man’s hand.

  “So,” he said, “how do you know ol’ Dolores here?”

  One of us said, “We were her neighbors.”

  “Ah, you can’t beat a real neighbor. Especially these days.”

  “Yes. I guess that’s true.”

  “How long have you two been living together?”

  She winced. I tried not to think about why.

  I said, “Not that long.”

  “Well, good luck to you. I apologize for the freak show. I’m sure you knew Dolores wasn’t your average old lady, and her friends, as you can see, certainly don’t fit that bill.”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  “Well, I would hope not.” Turning to Ellen, he asked, “So, what’s your getup here? Jackie O at the funeral? Little Asian John-John?”

  “Uh, yes. I am from Boston. The Boston area.”

  “You rarely see it go this way, Asian boy and corn-fed girl. It’s always the other way around. Makes no sense to me. I say let the high achiever be the breadwinner. Why let all that work ethic go to waste?”

  Despite myself, I laughed. The bald man smiled warmly and said, “This one knows what I’m talking about. I suppose it’s the media’s fault, especially media like me. I don’t think we’ve filmed one single Asian male interracial scene, except when we gave Hisanori a little gift for his fifth-year anniversary with the company.”

  “Who?”

  “Shoptalk. I’m boring you, but what beautiful half-Asian children you two will have. I’m not just saying that, by the way, because I’ve seen some monstrous and even some fat half-Asians, but I’m saying it because he has the face of a scholar and you, madam, are clearly descended from noble stock. There’s just no way to miss. Mazel tov!”

  “Thank you.”

  “All right, then, once I catch your names, I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

  “My name is Ellen. This is Phil.”

  “Miles Hofspaur. And now, let’s go introduce you to some people.”

  10. Miles Hofspaur introduced us to Jennifer Rabbit, Blonde Ambition, Crystal Brandy, Preston Page, Prince Albert and the Knights of Ram-a-Lot, Lily Love, Larry Love, Alex Burns, and Anita Richard, who would be replacing Dolores as lead singer for the electric funk band Consciousness. We met all the old hippies who had names that could not have been real and the security guards before Miles brought us over to the Latino youth and took us down the line, introducing us to David, Oscar, Ignacio, John, Simon, and, finally, David, the Advanced Creative Writer.

  “These fine young men,” Miles said, gesturing down the line of sweaty kids in ill-fitted suits, “are Dolores’s passion, her corazón. What a saint she was, no, boys?”

  David, Oscar, Ignacio, John, Simon, and David, the Advanced Creative Writer, nodded. I felt kind of bad for them, shifting around nervously, trying not to react in any way to the surrounding insanity. There’s nothing as stifling and infuriating as a well-intentioned, garrulous white man who is trying very hard to introduce you, his unexpected minority associates, in his best, most graceful way. Despite not knowing what to make of David the Advanced Creative Writer’s blank stare, I felt the urge, paternal, I guess, to corral them around me and scream something about how they didn’t need to feel like this white man was doing them some favor by showing off his magnanimous airs.

  “Dolores,” he continued, “our saint, gave her life to the city orphanages. These are some of her children, all of them fine young men who have come out to respect someone who was so important in their lives.”

  He led us away, back toward the folding table with the booze, and then left to go greet another couple. I poured out a quarter handle of gin into our cups. We sipped quietly amid the cheery talk, the bang of the staple gun, and the jangle of the band warming up. Ellen said it first: “Well, I guess the liberals are right.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He thought we were just ogling the murder scene.”

  “In his defense, we were.”

  “So where does that put us?”

  “Let’s figure it out later. Try to enjoy this.”

  “Okay, and will you look at that girl’s ass? Are you even into that sort of thing?”

  THE BAND PLAYED its first discernible chord, and everyone hushed and turned their attention to Anita Richard, who was standing in front of the microphone. She had changed into full bondage gear, and as the band rattled through the opening bars of “Play with Fire,” she kept time, badly, by snapping her bullwhip. But she had a believable snarl and stalked around the grass, and it was the sort of trying too hard that stops short of being pitiful. I, at least, could appreciate the spectacle. And the drummer wasn’t bad. At all, really.

  After the requisite five-minute jam session at the end of “Play with Fire,” which involved Anita Richard crawling on all fours and licking the air, a stumpy old lady walked up to the microphone and cleared her throat. She was wearing an ankle-length prairie dress, complete w
ith quilted pockets and overly laced hem. A tuft of gray hair hovered over her tiny skull, not as if it were part of her, but more as if it were something entirely different that happened to be following her around. She introduced herself as Dolores’s sister and pulled out a stack of note cards from one of those quilted pockets. A light applause scattered through the crowd.

  Clearing her throat again, this time a bit indecently, she said, “Thank you all for coming here today. I am meeting almost all of you for the first time, but there is real love here and I find comfort in the fact that my sister lived amidst such beautiful and vibrant people.

  “When we were girls growing up in Bakersfield, Dolores would always ask what I was going to say at her funeral. The question never carried the tone you might expect out of sisters—wistful, loving, with implied white-haired women who only say wise things, men lost to noble causes or noble illnesses, thick blood, beautiful hats, and varied grandchildren. There was none of that. Instead, I felt the hardness of a demand, a tinge of moral superiority, as if she was asking when I was going to hurry up and return her one good tartan dress, the one I couldn’t quite fill out. What could I have said? She was the brown, leggy, forever California girl who could have doubled as both Ms. Seaside Pier and Ms. Brushfire Awareness. I was the older, mawkish brunette whose stockings rumpled, whose forehead protruded that disastrous half inch too much, the girl who floats face-first in the pool at the end of Act One.

  “When we met up a year ago for a cousin’s funeral, she asked if the eulogy had offered up any inspiration. She didn’t explicitly say it, but I knew what she was implying. I reminded her, a bit too wryly, that the eulogy had been based on the life cycle of the salmon, and that for someone who had done what she had done, there was no returning to the home stream. She took it badly—she always took my deflections badly—but it wasn’t anything that hadn’t happened over the previous sixty years.

  “Now that the time has come for me to say something, I predictably find myself at a loss. Not because I have nothing to say, but rather because there’s nothing I can tell you, her life, her assembled mob, that you don’t know better than I do.”

  She stopped there, and, for the first time since starting speaking, she looked up from her notes. Her eyes were calm, the color of beach stones in winter. We all heard the wind rattle through the snare drum, and somewhere, off on another hill, a lawn mower started up. The Baby Molester’s sister seemed crushed by this intrusion. But when the moment passed, she continued.

  “Dolores lived more, yes, but it was my idea for us to move to San Francisco. This was 1967, two years before the Summer of Love. I had just graduated from high school. Dolores was sixteen. The angst of all those pale, sharp-elbowed years had spun out into a grim, tightfisted dream of becoming a poet. San Francisco, as I understood, or, I suppose, misunderstood, was where a girl should go to become a poet. Dolores at sixteen was just like Dolores now and Dolores at twenty-six, but in Bakersfield, 1967, there weren’t too many ways for vitality to be contextualized. She slept around. She sometimes walked in front of our stepfather in her underwear. But there was nothing unusual about this, except that she did all these things without the slightest hint of theater or remorse. Most beautiful women are crippled in some way by their power. Dolores just used it, never to get ahead, but just to use it because it was there.

  “Maybe that’s why she got San Francisco when I never could. Why the vacant spectacle of the Panhandle never bothered her. For those first few years, we did the same unbelievable things. We took acid and sat on the Dead’s stoop in the Haight. We raised our fists with the Panthers. We came under the influence of terrible men. We drove to the desert and talked about death, Native Americans. From all that, I cordoned off a harsh little plot of judgment. My poems grew out of that acrid soil. Truth be told, I would have done the same thing had I stayed in Bakersfield. Instead of poems, I would have just raised miserable children.

  “Dolores never cared much for my strangled, constructed things—I remember taking her once to City Lights to watch John Ashbery read “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” and “Donald Duck in Hollywood.” She shifted nervously through all of it, but after I had introduced myself to Ashbery and curtsied—curtsied!—Dolores and I got cappuccinos and cannolis at an Italian bakery up across the street from the Roaring 20s. I remember she took her cannoli and just stood it up in her coffee cup and left it steeping as I tried to explain to her all the postmodern wonders of Ashbery’s poems. When I was done, the cannoli sogged down, Dolores said that it must be nice to be in love with a man who had such an organized brain because it provides comfort for the future. That was my sister, always cutting right through it all to lay me bare.

  “Of course, I was in love with Ashbery, and that was the point—think of poor ol’ Borges, who arranged the world so symmetrically and geometrically, creating these perfect little prose engines and then gifting them all to his old loves. But I hated her for bringing emotion into it, to dismiss the height of my intellectual vanity for what it was.

  “I’m not so naive to say that the ideas Dolores believed in were real, even back when they were conceived, but they at least were ideas. Those ideas have devolved into rationalizations—peace, love, and happiness is why the kids get excited about the new Eritrean restaurant, why they take photos in Thailand. Free love is vibrator slogan. Equality has become a way for certain rich people who have money and a certain education to pit themselves against other rich people. This is not news to anyone.

  “And yet. Seeing you all here today, each one of you trying so hard, I can still feel the cold hand of reason on my neck: how cliché, these efforts, how useless, these desires. Here we are, even me, this cloistered false hippie, celebrating this depraved woman’s life. And although context, history, forces me to acknowledge that people are people are people and my sister was my sister was my sister, in Bakersfield or on the moon, I can’t help but wonder what all of you might have looked like had we never moved to San Francisco to participate in whatever it was that happened. My place at this funeral was fated long ago. You were the variable.”

  She cleared her throat once more, but whatever it had been that had inspired her words wouldn’t rev up again. She sat, quietly, back down.

  Ellen, I noticed, was crying. Sobbing, really.

  I asked, “What’s wrong?”

  She said, “This just reminds me of something. From high school. Don’t worry—it’s not anything you have to understand.”

  The band, perhaps sensing a moment, stumbled through the opening bars of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and the old hippies sang along, teary-eyed, and I wondered if anything had ever been so aesthetically objectionable and culturally inert as a bunch of old hippies singing a Peter, Paul and Mary song at the funeral of one of their old freaky San Francisco friends. And still, I thought about my mother, who would have been around their age, and her stories of protesting the Vietnam War in the streets of Seoul, and despite my attempts to suppress negativity, for Ellen’s sake, I recalled the words of that fat, bald, gay music professor on how my father lacked the cultural heritage to understand Blonde on Blonde.

  Whenever I summon up that memory, I picture my mother wandering around the basement of the music building at Bowdoin, maybe at graduation, maybe during one of those disastrous parents’ weekends, lost in the linoleum, the industrial shelving, the blond oak doors that led into the small practice cubicles, and everywhere the smell of Ajax and spit valve. She had a habit of staying lost when she got lost as if wandering aimlessly was a condition that required no maintenance. During a trip to Mount Washington, she simply disappeared on a trail, and after six hours of searching and frantic chopped-English descriptions given to passersby and park rangers, we found her sitting cross-legged on the hood of our station wagon. A pile of dandelion roots lay in her lap. She didn’t seem to comprehend our hysteria because all she said was, “I dug these up with my keys. We can make tea out of this, believe it or not.” There were other times li
ke this, and by the time I turned twelve, we simply let her wander off, knowing we’d always find her back by the car. And so, although she died four years before I left for college, it’s logical or, perhaps, empirically validated to picture her wandering around the basement of the music building, the only place on campus where she might bump into Professor MacArthur, who, despite his grandiose bullying, was rarely seen anywhere else. He asks if she needs help finding something and she pauses to think it over and he will wonder if this tiny woman understands the question and so he asks again, louder and slower. She will smile and ask who he is and he will tell her and she will ask if he’s ever taught her son, Philip Kim, and he will thrust out his hips, in recognition, and say, yes, yes, he’s a bright boy and we talk about music quite frequently. She will ask if he’s the music professor who is always going on about Bob Dylan. His hands will dig into his pockets, his hips will again rock forward, and his mouth will twist into his best, magnanimous smile. Here is a nice man, she will think, about my age. She will say something clumsy about “Blowing in the Wind,” and he will be careful and smile and nod and think the best liberal thoughts about sharing and the cultural exchange and maybe he will ambitiously invite her up to the music library, his other sanctuary, where he can be found every afternoon with his oversized hi-fi headphones, listening to some jazz record from the private collection he so graciously has lent out for supervised student consumption. Maybe he will sit her down at a listening carrel, snap the headphones over the black satin headband she always wore on formal occasions, the touch of a woman who was always concerned with subtlety, and play her “Visions of Johanna” or “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” just to watch her face crumble with the embarrassment of something loved that was then found to be something else, a bigamist of a memory.