"I don't want to be here.” Her promise got lost
somewhere in its direction. “I want to go home. I want you to take me to my house but don't tell anyone." "Ok. No problem. We can go now if you want to." A car from behind blew its horn. My heart jumped like a bird. And it was as if Lazarus himself slapped my mother in the face bringing her back to her senses. Her mind turned the corner.
"There it is! There they are! I can see it. Clear as it can be. Can you see it? You’re father is right over there." Her pointing finger hit my nose and nearly sliced it off my face. She had such a look about her that I almost burst out laughing. She broke into giddy laughter, stretching her throat sweetly and shaking her head. She put her hands together. "Your wicked father is gonna drive me crazy." There was youth in her bones.
Her sparked memory drove us to a neighboring section with some familiarity. She rolled the car over a buried curb and parked on the graved bones of some other poor soul.
"Come on, hurry, let's go. Get out of the car so I can lock it." My interest in following lagged a couple of yards behind her pace. The smell of lilacs and fresh grass clippings comforted my nerves.
“Come on, come on. You don’t want to get lost around here” – her words followed behind as if they were brain-crumbs for me to follow.
“I’m right behind you.” Cemetery plots were considered real estate to my mother's kind. Years ago, after the Depression, it was the tiny piece of land one could afford to buy, to stand on claiming it as their holding. A plot five feet by ten feet, barely a spec of an acre made them property owners. They felt connected to the earth and securely grounded in ownership.
My mother had no intentions of being buried in the ground. I often thought this brave-looking woman was in reality scared out of her wits not necessarily of dying but of being buried in the ground. Maybe secretly she thought of all the bugs she killed, the roaches she brutally smashed to death under the weight of those torpedoing telephone books at a time when she was a young mother living in the cleaning store; perhaps she thought the entire roach community would crawl to her grave for revenge and finish her off, gorging themselves on her flesh. For whatever reason, my mother had other plans and made them known to me and to my sisters.
"I want to be laid in a polished silver casket with angel's heads at each corner and silver plated handles. My wake will need to be two days with a lot of finger food. Make sure to put two huge lush flower baskets on each side about yea tall (the yea tall measured about four inches above her standing position). And one of those big wreaths should have roses and calla lilies with the gold Mother ribbon crossing the wreath. You know, like those ribbons they use at the Miss America pageants. Lay that one on the top, over my legs. Tell the choir to sing the Our Father, Amazing Grace and Ave Maria.”
She continued with hardly a space for a tiny breath, “And the procession of cars. Suzka you make sure you count them. There should be many. You would make your mother very happy if you can make sure there are fifty-eight, at least fifty-eight. I’d be happy with one more than fifty-eight but I’m not greedy. Greedy is a sin. After the Mass is all done with and I'm put in the crypt, then you can take everybody to Crystals for lunch. You pay."
I heard it a million times.
*
“Come on, come on now.”
“I’m right behind you. I’m right behind you.”
We walked to a marble-faced structure about the size of eight caskets high and sixteen across. The marble faced wall was cut in squares. Behind each square were bones in metal boxes decaying by themselves feeding no one. My father's bones were behind one of those squares.
We stood side-by-side in front of a marbled wall looking for the square with my father's nameplate glued in the center. I waited and watched while my mother made these brisk elongated movements, tapping on the marble squares while counting in fallen whispers. When she was confident in her resolve, she announced with graciousness and splendor, "Here it is."
Her arms fully opened like the stone angel at the main entrance. She stepped back and took a deep breath of the fresh morning air and said, "This is my surprise."
My face followed her.
“What do you think?” She asked.
I watched her carefully, my face nervously frowning
for no particular reason. "I bought all these slots in this section. Not just the two where your father and myself will be staying. I bought all these… ten in all." She made it sound like she made reservations at a Hilton, a family timeshare in the Caribbean Islands.
Then she came at me again as clean as a comet with wings bigger than the biggest in all the heavens. “You and your sisters and all your husbands… we’ll all be together. You don’t have to worry about where you’re going. You’ll be here.”
What… what did she say?
"Suzka, pay attention. Did you hear me? Look. There are exactly ten slots here. Your father is in this one, rest his soul." Violet kissed her fingers and transferred her kiss onto the cold marble marked with my father's name.
"Now listen carefully 'cause after I die I don't want you and your sisters to be fighting over who gets which one."
Fighting… what did she say… oh we’ll be fighting… I was flabbergasted.
"I'm gonna lay here, right next to your father. Now all these others are for you girls and your husbands."
The hairs on my body rose.
"Mom, what are you talking about? When did you do this?" "Years ago. It was hard to keep this secret from you girls but I did. Now pay attention. This one is for Mira and this one for her husband. Lil'Vi will be here and her husband right next to her. Now over here on this side is where you will go. You're on the end. You can lay right here..."
For eternity? My eternity? Oh my god, what in the hell did she do? "Who's this?” It appeared my mother’s full plan was interrupted. Her voice changed and got rather serious. “Someone new moved in the next slot - the one next to you. No one told me about this.”
My mother squished her nose to raise her bifocals as she leaned over to read the letters on the neighboring marbled square. The letters read Joseph DeGregario. She slowly whispered his name. "Joseph DeGregario." Then she paused for a long time. Obviously she was rearranging her original plan. All at once she looked at me, quite angelically and said, "It’s a sign.”
The rest of her body was stone-stuck. Her eyes moved back to Joseph. She was heavy in thought calculating the facts before her. “Look Suzka. All these people around him have different names. He has no one laying next to his name."
Her brains stopped thinking and surrendered to the gift given to her. "It's a sign for sure, a sign from God." My mother appeared to be in shock as if she saw the Virgin Mary herself.
"Look. Look right here. There is no place for a wife layin' next to him. He’s not married. Joseph DeGregario is single."
Oh God make her stop.
She looked up to the skies. "Thank you Jesus and all the saints in heaven." Violet checked the birth and death dates under his name. She didn't need to do the math. She had that look. She could die now. The sky's opened, the trees clapped, a breeze brought the sweet smell of wedding jasmine and lilacs.
"He's perfect and just a few years older than you." Violet made the sign of the cross three times thanking everyone; God, Jesus, the virgins and all the saints she knew. "DeGregario. That's such a nice name. A nice Italian man."
The decision was consummated. “You will be buried here, by Joseph. Yes, you will be right here... next to Joe. God wants that to be."
I stood staring at her for a moment with an unwilling delight at the grotesque charm of the moment around me. My mother mumbled her good fortune to the trees and the birds as we walked back to the car never looking back.
"Don't forget, we got to go and get my driver's license expanded. Then after that you can go and do whatever you do. For now, let's go to Crystals and have lunch."
"Mom, why don't I drive?"
She turned around and looked at me from he
ad to toe. "Why? You don't think I can drive? Don't be silly. I've been driving since I was twelve."
Pause.
“Just look at your feet. Is that paint on your sandals?”
[ I looked down at my feet the same way I did when I was little. They looked like the shoes of an explorer. My sandals were artistically covered with the remains of an inspiration. ]
18.
THE FLYING COMETS “Just look at your feet! Mira's feet are not as dirty as your feet. Look. Look how nice and clean she is. You don't see her feet dirty do you?”
[ That was a Sunday. Two days later the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was televised
– the day that kick-started our love of television. We owned a 16inch picture tube Magnavox. ]
“I have no time to scrub you clean right now. I have all this stuff to put away from our picnic. The food, the breads, the jello..." When she was done with her list, she took one more look. "Good Lord, dirt does love you child."
Cemeteries, no matter how groomed and friendly they are, had dirt that wanted to leave. They would attach themselves to little girls who jump, run and cartwheel on the residents. Dirt would stick itself to bare feet and hide under the nail parts and in toe jams undetected. My father had to wash and scrub them away on those picnic nights and other nights when my mother worked late sewing buttons on customers' wedding clothes and funeral suits.
"Pavel. Pavel!” flew out of her as if her mouth was on fire. She looked down at me pitiful like and said, “Go. Go to your father and have him clean you up before you go to bed… Pavel!"
* I had stood in the porcelain kitchen sink filled with warm water. The end of my legs disappeared under a cloud of bubbles. My father hated long back-bending baths in a tub so he replaced them with footbaths in the kitchen sink. He would tell me, "Dirt is like ketchup. At the end of the day, it all settles to the bottom."
My mom was busy making alterations on suits that customers brought into the cleaning store. She was normally finished before dinner, but on this day, a big weekend wedding and two funerals kept her busier than usual. Old clothes needed to be cleaned and pant cuffs hemmed for the big events. My father would have to bathe us girls and put us in our pajamas on those nights.
I loved sink baths. It was better for story telling. Plus the sink only had room for one set of feet. It was more private. My sink bath took the longest. My feet were dirtier than my sisters, dirt that only alley archeologists would collect from their digs.
I rested one arm on my father's shoulder for support and the other on the window frame above the sink. Outside the window I could see whether Stacy was in her yard. The window gave me a perfect view. Stacy's yard was in the front of her house. There was no grass. It was filled with undernourished dirt in unplanned piles and mounds. Wood planks led visiting guests from the street gate to their front door. When it rained the dirt turned to mud and stuck to Stacy's shoes. Her mom would yell all the time at Stacy and her brothers for tracking mud pies in the house. I could hear her in our kitchen.
On hot summer days the window brought in smells of dead fish. Buckets of smelt caught by Stacey's father that morning or the day prior were kept outside. When the sun was done his sons would dig a hole and build a pit for their cooking. At nighttime the fire would turn the boys’ dark faces gold and their teeth into pearls. Music tickled everyone's feet. Dirt danced in circles. Laughing, singing and the deathless sounds of children carried on in the late summer night's heat and kept us awake. Under the covers, inside my head, I giggled and cartwheeled around the fire with Stacy until I fell asleep.
"Com'on Papa, tell me the story again about the flies." It was awkward for me to call my father 'papa.' I thought papa but said father. Everyone in the house called him father. Wait 'til your father comes home young lady; or Ask your father; or Go check if your father's drinking. Father washed my feet in the kitchen sink Papa told me the stories like the one about the Performing Fly Comets.
"Don't you want to hear a different story? Suzka, you know the whole story by heart, nearly word for word.” He took a deep breath of resolve. “When I get too old to tell it, you better be the one to tell it to me."
In reality, I knew it was my father’s favorite. "It's just the best story ever. Com'on Papa… and no shortcuts. I want to hear everything from the beginning to the end. Don't leave anything out. Now that I'm five, I know more when you skip stuff."
"What about the magic banana story?" "That's not a story, that's a magic trick, which I haven't figured out yet. I’m gonna talk to Stacey about that. She knows just about everything. She’ll be able to figure it out."
"Stacy huh... How could I forget?" I put my nose to the window to see if Stacy was in her yard. "You know, she is quite now-ledged, especially about magic tricks. Gypsies know just about everything there is to know about magic."
Stacy was exactly my same size. We were both explorers and secret friends. Stacy had black shiny long hair that separated over her dark shoulders and a canopy of bangs shading her black almond eyes. Her mother told her she looked like her grandmother when she was about Stacy's age living in a small town in Turkey. Stacy’s grandmother is dead now.
A wire fence with large square openings, large enough for small hands to squeeze through, separated us. The fence made it easy to share secrets and licorice. Near the bottom of the fence was a wood ledge that we would step on and reach over when we needed to exchange bigger secrets and uncut sandwiches.
My friend Stacy had four brothers. She was the youngest and the only girl. They all had black hair, shorter than Stacy's but longer than most boys I knew. They smoked cigarettes. There was always a white cigarette tucked behind the boys' dark ears. They were scary cool to most people. I loved scary cool.
When our bird died, a canary and yellow in color, my father buried the lifeless creature in the corner of our tiny yard close to the fence. Stacy reverently watched from the other side, standing tall and soldier straight. I saw Stacy's right hand cover her heart through the whole burial. She saluted at the end when my father tapped down the mud pile with his shovel. Stacy was my best friend.
"You better not tell your mother about Stacy. She's doesn't like their wild ways. It's best she stays on her side of the fence and you stay on our side. That way there's no trouble. And don't let your mother catch you even thinkin' about going over to Stacy's yard through the alleyway."
My father added more soap on the soiled washcloth. He looked down into the sink where the clouds of bubbles were slowly drowning in a pool of dark gray water. The sink's sides were edged scummy-like in alley dirt.
"Sometimes I think you are dead set on making your mother crazy."
"What you lookin' at in the bubbles for? Com'on now, tell me the story about your workin' in the factory with the flies."
During the week my father worked at Western Electric in Cicero. A huge factory with a whistle that was heard for miles telling all the workers it was time to come to work. He worked long hours. My sisters and I were fast asleep when he finished his workday. He would peek in our room and glance for a moment at our closed faces. My face was never really closed. I pretended to sleep.
"Common' now. We don't have all night papa."
"Ok. Now let me see... It was a warmer day than usual. Winter was at the end of its cold. The bus let me off at the work stop. Leo was with me. Now normally the bus fumes fill my nose on both sides but this day a tiny bit of jasmine snuck in and tickled my hairs telling me it was spring. Leo and I walked into the factory and took the elevator going up to our department. The minute those elevator doors opened, I knew it was goin' to be a good flying day. All the windows were cracked wide open. Fresh city air filled the room."
"All us guys walked through the maze of maybe a hundred work tables and machines. Mine was in the back close to a line of opened windows. I just got settled and then it started. They saw me. That’s when they all came rushin' over to my station, buzzin' around my work head. They kept buzzin' all morning long. Flies. Big flies; f
lies that spent all winter just getting’ fat. They would do circles and dives, showing off with all kinds of flying maneuvers just to get my attention. A few sat on my tools walking back and forth showing their muscles. Did you know that flies have muscles?"
I didn’t know that. My father continued with his personal analogy. "You know flies are hyper, like you in the morning. They sleep all winter long. Then when the spring sun tickles their feet to wake up, they start going crazy."
I always interrupted about this time with an urgency to express to my father, the kind and compassionate side of my character. I would tell my father that I never in my whole life killed a fly. Roaches and mosquitoes - yes, but never did I ever smash-kill a fly.
He always made a point to acknowledge my selective kindness. "Good girl."
"Well, the flies would talk to each other and the word got around. Mornings was the time then all the flies in the room could audition. After about three or four hours of workin', a whistle would tell us it was time to stop what we were doing and open our lunch buckets. That's when all the flies got real serious. It was their last chance to show me how well they can fly. They would do nose dives, back flips, tumbles, twisters and serpentines."
My face showed more seriousness in listening. I knew we were getting close to the good part.
"First, I cleared my work area. Then I took out the paper napkin from my lunch bucket, laid it open on my table and cut long thin strips, about… so wide."
My father would raise his arm out of the water, put his thumb and index finger close together and raise them an inch away from my nose. It took both my eyes meeting in the middle to see the tiny smidgen of space between them.
"After I cut, I donno, about ten, maybe fifteen strips, I would lay them down on my table side-by-side. Then, starting with only one strip, I lay it alone in the center of square sheet of paper on my worktable. On one end of the strip, at the tip I put the tiniest spec of glue "
I was quite satisfied. This was the long version of the story. My father continued:
"Now I had to be extra smart. I start to look around the room, lookin' for the best and biggest fly. And there were plenty to choose from. When I found the fly that appeared to be exceptional, my eyes would follow him closely to make sure he was the best one. Then I would swing my hand quickly in the air and in one quick sweep, catch him in the cup of my hand as not to squeeze him."
Wonders In Dementialand: Dementialand Page 12