by Ann Tracy
My mind was so crowded with horror and impossibility that I heard only bits of what the minister was telling us. “I am the resurrection and the life.” “Though he were dead, yet shall he live.” “In my father’s house are many mansions.” Once I came out of my chaos to hear him saying, “Mourning is only a deeper form of love.” “But it’s a bad one,” I wanted to say; “It hurts.” We seemed to be there for quite a while, the yellow light from the stained glass making all of us look nearly as unreal as Dwight, and I put most of my energy into holding myself together. Black, lunatic rhymes ran though my head—Dwight, Dwight, endless night. Once I found myself thinking that whatever cowboys liked, they didn’t like being dead.
I watched the boys, too sad to lift their feet, drag past the coffin when their turns came. I myself intended to get a long last look, to be bold and take away an eyeful of Dwight to last out my life, but I saw the scars first and turned my face away and then my time was past.
We came out of church into a kind of vacuum. Emptiness is extra big on the coast, with the whole ocean out there. But Jewell came and led me to the car where Viv and Sabra were. It was the only time I ever saw Sabra cry.
The cemetery was none of those I’d seen on the way in, but a desolation of puckerbrush and wind, with the garish green of a grass rug and a hole, an ordinary hole, in the earth. My Dwight in that? No comfort there. After the briefest of blessings a little man sent us away, and we heard a voice behind us say, “Lower.” (As long as you don’t hear the clods dropping on the coffin, Scarlett, folks aren’t actually dead to you.)
My father most surprisingly sensed my need and let me ride home with my friends, while he did the long and dreary drive by himself, a piece of generosity for which I, in my self-absorption, was not even grateful. Jimmy Judson drove the car we rode in. I had known him all our lives, but today he seemed someone new and older. I was glad he was there.
Before the first frenzy of grief had faded into the long ache of recovery, I went back to my typewriter and put down everything I could remember. My family now let me stay alone as much as I liked. I was desperate in those first days for some scrap, some touch, some memento of Dwight. I drew a little pencil sketch of him, wearing the clothes he’d worn on his last day, and put it in a frame in the bottom of a drawer. Every day when I got home from school I opened the drawer and said hello to him. I’d have liked to wear the gold pin, but I couldn’t risk its loss.
But memory isn’t enough, when hope is gone. I was plagued by the thought of all that Dwight and I would never do, both amorous and otherwise, and so at last I thrust Lucilla Shark into bed with Brownell Flite and achieved a kind of paper consummation, necessarily vague about technical details, but tender. For a whole week I read it every day and it consoled me a little for what I foresaw as a lifetime of lonely polar sheets, for with whom else but Dwight would such closeness be thinkable? What those pages said was too private ever to tell.
At the end of that week I realized that no place was safe enough to hide that piece of intimacy, except my memory, so one evening when I was home alone I crept to the wood stove and burned the love scene, and the rest of the manuscript after it. The pages curled and blackened and fell to nothing while I watched, not rescued from annihilation’s wake after all. My imaginary life with Dwight, like my real one, crumbled and drifted away.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Exactly five weeks and four days after Dwight died, I broke down and let Marc Andover kiss me, half way up the drive, in the middle of a snowstorm. I had seriously meant never to let anybody kiss me again, to have Dwight the last person who ever did it, and indeed I had fended off quite a few attempts in those thirty-nine days. But I finally wore down; I didn’t have much spunk that winter.
That was a long winter, 1958, and a dreary one. I never went to any more basketball games, for somehow I didn’t like being in the gym anymore, and in rural Maine in the winter, basketball is all there is for entertainment. I read a lot, as I always had, but only gloomy stuff suited me. I read On The Beach, about people dying of radiation poisoning, and I read all of “In Memoriam,” Tennyson’s long poem about grieving for his best friend. I copied most of it out on my typewriter, and when I came to an “Arthur” I’d stick in a “Dwight B” instead, because that made two syllables, but it never scanned very well. Like everything else, it seemed out of step. I did my homework. I tried to get interested in the imminence of college. I watched a little TV, but there seemed to be a lot of car wrecks on it. And every day I made an excuse to go upstairs as soon as I got home, and looked at my drawing of Dwight.
Willard Jewell began to come around too, that winter. We’d sit on the sofa to watch television and hold one another and talk a little now and then. I assumed at first that we were clinging together out of grief. I found this comforting. When certain moves of Willard’s suggested that grief was not his principal impetus, I went on with it anyway. I liked old Jewell just fine, and sometimes he made me laugh a little. Besides, once I’d messed up on keeping my lips sacred to Dwight’s memory, what else was left to lose?
The obvious answer to that didn’t occur to me, perhaps because I regarded my virginity as a permanent, natural state, like being 5’2”. One afternoon early in May, when nature was beginning to show that some things come back, Willard and I found ourselves in the house after school, with several hours at our disposal. We necked for a while in silence, a depressed, dozy, lethargic silence on my part. Perhaps a thoughtful one on Jewell’s, I don’t know.
When he tipped me over and bore me down onto the couch I was vaguely taken with the novelty of it, though not very comfortable.
“Easy, Jewell,” I said after a few minutes of absent-minded grappling. “You’re squashing my leg.”
“Don’t call me that; call me Willard,” he said, suddenly serious. I remembered his sober and bereft face the morning after Dwight died, and I loved him a little.
“Off my leg, Willard,” I said. He shifted his weight. I gave him an encouraging pat on the back. We lay still, side by side, for a moment.
“Up,” he murmured at last and struggled to sit straight, pulling me up and against his shoulder. I waited passively.
We sat for what seemed a long time while Willard looked pensive and stroked my arm. I found the effect of this hypnotically soothing. Once when I was little my mother had shown me how she could mesmerize a chicken—she’d just grabbed a young one and flopped him down on the barn floor and stroked his neck until he lolled there by himself looking silly and dazed. I felt like that. The idea of my mother (and, via the medium of chickens, my father) was faintly, but not very, disturbing. I was glassy eyed.
“Fish,” Willard said at last, “perhaps it’s time you came to terms with the Life Force, Old Mother Nature, rape, riot, and revolution.”
I was thinking dreamily that I didn’t have the energy for revolution when he turned and looked me in the eye.
“Life goes on,” he said.
“You need to snap out of this,” he said, “and commit yourself to some course of action.”
“Fish,” he said, taking my hand, “it’s spring. You and I are alive. We’re seniors. Some college boy will get you next year. Let it be me, now. Let’s make love before your folks get home; that’s a course of action. Couldn’t we go up to your room and be private?”
My room? That was private indeed. Dangerous too. When my friends and I were around nine or so, all our mothers had suddenly announced that children of opposite sexes could not play in one another’s rooms any more, for dreadful things could happen. (What they were, a friend with older sisters told me in one terse, four-letter word. It was hard for me to imagine the unspeakable being done to me by some third-grade friend I’d known all my life, but who can penetrate the mysteries of human behavior?) The dangers seemed remote, though, and not very important. “The grave’s a fine and private place” came into my head, and then I didn’t seem to care anymore what happened. I worked up a kind of dopey politeness.
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�Certainly. Come along,” I said.
It took effort to lift one foot ahead of the other as we went up the stairs. I didn’t feel alarmed, just unreal. Willard looked nervous and once he actually took my elbow. That struck me funny.
Still locked into politeness, I found myself trying to give Willard a tour of the family photos we passed going down the hall to my room. I was just showing him the picture of my maternal grandparents’ farm when I saw how ridiculous this was. He was being as mannerly as a guest could be, but he didn’t look happy.
“Never mind,” I said. “My room’s down here.”
I took his hand and led him into it, feeling in spite of the circumstances my familiar pride in how nice it looked. Except perhaps for the bed, which looked about an acre across and eight feet high. Had it always taken up that much of the room? We marched across the floor and hoisted ourselves onto its edge, where we sat side by side for a bit.
“Do we have to do this with Viv and Sabra staring at us?” he asked, nodding towards the pictures on my bookcase.
“I guess we could turn them around,” I said slowly. But I was remembering another picture, drawn in pencil and tucked into a bottom drawer. My poor facsimile of Dwight was with us too. No shutting those eyes behind wood. Being now passed beyond the physical, his eye like God’s was always upon me. Thou Dwight seest me. Perhaps he’d understand that I did it out of grief and desperation.
“Well,” said Willard.
“Well,” I said, and we rolled over onto the bedspread.
But it didn’t work, somehow. When we lay against each other, none of our superficial bumps and hollows fitted any more. Our hands didn’t meet. Our feet kicked each other by accident. Both lust and lethargy were passing away. Lethargy anyway. Little or none of the lust had been mine in the first place, but I sensed that Willard too was finding the situation eroded.
“Willard,” I said, sitting up, “I think I just can’t do this after all. I’m sorry.”
He sat up too. “I hear,” he said, “that it isn’t too great the first time anyway.”
I kissed him then with real affection, for being himself and a part of my life. For not waving his pistols and insisting on being a cowboy. For being my friend instead. I had never loved him more.
We sat on the edge of the bed again, shoulder to shoulder, and it felt natural. This room was the place where I took my friends, and Willard was my friend. I was within an inch of offering to show him my jewelry.
We looked together out my east windows, where Venice and Paris lay beyond our sight, once again desirable.
“Willard,” I said, feeling new freedom, “can I ask you something?”
“What is it?” he said.
I only blushed a little. “What do cowboys like?” I said. He was my friend now for sure; it was safe to ask.
Willard looked startled, even alarmed, but he pulled himself together. “Why,” he said, “we almost did it.”
I looked out my window and smiled to myself.
“No,” I said, “no, I think they prefer the wide open ranges.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Epilogue
What can I tell you? We all got on with our lives. That’s a more or less involuntary activity. Some of us went to college, some of us didn’t. Some of us married once or twice, some of us stayed single. Viv’s a school principal herself now, and since she divorced that not very satisfactory man she had earlier dated at Canterbury, she’s raised two sons single-handedly, with lots of firmness and efficiency and love. Sabra married a lawyer, had her babies with a minimum of labor, owns a house with a swimming pool and a tennis court, and stays thin; her magic has held. Willard’s a tour bus driver, he really is, and I often think how his passengers must adore him. We’ve lost touch with Marc.
Me, I’ve been to Istanbul. Been to the Harvard Museum, too, and once I actually went down to Kew in lilac time. I didn’t wander hand in hand with love, though. I wandered with my mother, who sometimes traveled with me after my father died, and that day a sudden cloudburst nearly drowned us and the lilacs too. But yes, I remembered my Senior English anthology, and I thought about Dwight, though there are days when I don’t.
The idea that time heals your wounds isn’t quite right. Time doesn’t heal them as much as it moves them a little farther back in your head, where you don’t bump into them every minute and set them bleeding. They’re still wounds.
But although the grief doesn’t go away, it gets more secret. The incident turns into a kind of underground, central myth in your personality, until you’re surprised and a little shocked to hear the dead person’s name mentioned, as though someone had been reading your private mail. Twenty-five years after Dwight died I had lunch with a couple of friends, one of whom had taught at Canterbury while we were there. “You remember Dwight Brown,” she said.
“Come on, lady,” I managed not to say, “my whole life has been a remembering of Dwight Brown.”
“Of course,” I said instead, or maybe I just nodded. Do I remember God? Do I remember the Easter Bunny? Has every character who dies young in books been Dwight to me for what seems like forever?
“He was so smart,” she said. “He’d have been valedictorian if he’d lived.”
For just an instant I opened my mouth to protest—no, no, it was always going to be me, you fool—and then I shut it again. I’ve had a chance to do other things.
“Yes, he would have,” I said. A small bouquet for you, Dwight, buddy.
Then there are the dreams. The earliest ones were awful, blood and open graves and once Dwight’s head in a box. Nowadays they’re rare but often faintly erotic, and I wake up with the precise feel of the back of his head in my hand, or see some forgotten detail of his skin, or remember how exactly the right height we were for kissing each other. I always know in the dreams that he’s dead, really, but it doesn’t make any difference—not a handicap that you’d hold against someone you love.
Canterbury’s gone now, sold to a Bible college, and we’re scattered, and other people live in my parents’ house, but sometimes it all comes back. Only a little while ago I had quite an elaborate dream about Dwight and all of us. We’d triumphed over Mr. Judson in some sort of permission-getting political ploy, and were very full of ourselves. We were lolling about in triumph on the front campus, picnicking, and Dwight was lying beside me. But then some rational part of my brain took over and time jarred back into place. I looked around and saw that we were just a bunch of middle-aged revelers on a Bible school lawn, and that we’d left Dwight behind.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1995 by Ann Tracy
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2871-4
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