The Undertaking of Tess

by Lesley Kagen

  Mom is brushing her luxurious hair with the silver brush and staring at me in the mirror. “Tell your grandmother that we ran out of grocery money.” She lined her eyes in black pencil and she stroked the lids with shadow made by the Revlon company. Dusky Blue is her favorite, same as Mr. Shank’s, which can’t be a coincidence. “Ask her to bring some cash to the funeral.”

  One of the reasons she wants me to call Gammy is because Mom really loves money and she doesn’t have any other family she can ask for some. You think she’d feel sorrier for Birdie and me because she must understand at least a little how we’re feeling. Her father died just like ours did, but not from drowning in a lake, from being a hero in the war. And her mother passed on a few years ago too from having something bad in her bladder or falling off a ladder, one of those two things. Mom won’t talk about it. She had a big brother for awhile named Virgil, but he ran off when he was sixteen to join the Navy and nobody ever heard from him again. If there is anybody else in her family like cousins or aunts and such, I never heard.

  The other reason Mom wants me to call Gammy is because she would never get what she wants if she called. Our grandmother loves Birdie and me, but not her. She calls our mother behind her back, “The little trollop.” This doesn’t sound so bad to me, but Boppa told me that it’s a huge insult if your people come from where they do—England. Chief exports: tea, Sherlock Holmes, and flowers.

  I’ll call our gammy, but just to tell her I love her, and ask her the question I had about growing pink peonies on the back of my neck. I won’t let my mother know that I didn’t ask that sweet old lady for grocery money because that would make her mad and I have to keep the peace around here. I’ll tell her there was no answer.

  “Sure, okay, I’ll call Gammy right away and tell her to bring some dough to the funeral, but before I do that … ah….” I have to try to convince her one more time. For my little sister’s sake. She really needs to get to Daddy’s pretend funeral. Even though he won’t be inside the casket, just seeing it, and hearing everyone blubber, would help Birdie understand the truth. “Please … if you don’t want us at church, could you at least let us go to the burial?” My sister could watch the box get lowered into the hole in the poor person’s part of the cemetery. She could press her lips against the gravestone that the veterans donated that would have his birthday and deathday engraved in it. That would be a huge help!

  Mom says, “You may have had your father wrapped around your little finger, Theresa, but when I say no, I mean no.”

  “But why can’t we go? What’s the reason?”

  She spins around to face me with the same look she gets on her face when she cleans leftovers out of the fridge. “You know what Mrs. Klement and all the other ladies in the Pagan Baby Society call you and Robin Jean instead of the Finley girls?”

  Mrs. Gertrude Klement is our repulsive next-door neighbor. She’s my number one enemy, and a big muckety-muck at St. Catherine’s. She’s also on one of my other lists.

  MY SHIT LIST

  Dennis Patrick

  The greasy man who tries to peek in the gas station bathroom window when you gotta stop to pee because you can’t make it home from the Tosa Theatre after you drink a large root beer.

  Mrs. Klement.

  Mom.

  Jenny Radtke.

  Because I’m not ashamed of the neighborhood nickname—those pagan ladies are nothing more than a bunch of ignorant Amoses—I stick out my chest and answer my mother, “They probably call us the Finley ghouls.” Their kids used to call us that too instead of the Finley girls. Ha … ha … ha. They’d act like zombies, and shuffle-yell at Birdie and me at recess until I lost my temper and showed them what Daddy taught me in the storage room at Lonnigan’s Bar. I know how to throw a punch, because he was not only a great father, he was a great fighter. He won trophies when he boxed at The Eagle Ballroom when he was younger in the Golden Gloves contest. “Keep moving. Never let ’em get you against the ropes, kiddo,” was one of his best tips. “And I don’t care how bad you’re bleeding, or how much you wanna quit a fight, a Finley never, ever throws in the towel.”

  Mom repeats disgusted, “The Finley ghouls,” and smacks her silver hairbrush down on the vanity like this is her courtroom and it’s a gavel. “I rest my case.”

  That’ll be the day.

  She hounds me and Birdie all the time about being too “morbid.” One of the ways she thinks we could be livelier is by getting a different hobby like baton twirling or hula hooping. Why can’t she see that our hobby isn’t just some stupid fad that is in today, out tomorrow. Death has been around forever, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

  All the nuns ever talk about in catechism class is dying, and how you better follow their rules and the Ten Commandments, or else you will get stoned or smitten and go to hell. Those are God’s two favorite ways to do away with people who don’t turn their book reports in on time, which is also a sin, but from what I can tell, just about everything is. Kids throw stones at each other all the time, so I understood what stoning was, but I wasn’t sure what smitten meant. Since priests and sisters pinch your ear really hard if you ask too many questions, I had to figure that out on my own. Smitten is a combination of two words. It means that if you don’t buckle under, God will get ticked off and strangle you with a mitten. Your tongue would pop out of your head and you would drool, so that doesn’t sound like a good way to go. Wet wool really stinks.

  Birdie and me talk a lot about the best way to die. For a while, she thought hanging herself from a tree like they do to the horse thieves in the cowboy movies wouldn’t be that bad, until I brought up that she doesn’t like to have tight things around her neck. So now she thinks sticking her head in Mrs. Carmody’s oven would be the best way to do away with herself because that lady wins prizes for her pies. Smelling warm cherries or apples and cinnamon instead of getting a bad rope burn before Birdie fell to sleep forever, would be much better, so I agreed with her. Since I love thunderstorms, the same way our daddy did, I think going to the middle of the cemetery during a terrible storm so I could get struck by lightning would be great. (And, Mr. Shank I’m sure would agree, very cost-effective.)

  But that’s just a fun game Birdie and me play, we wouldn’t really suicide ourselves. No matter how heartbroken you are, Catholics aren’t supposed to. The priests got so mad at Mrs. Garfield when she closed the garage doors and left her car motor running that they wouldn’t even let her body get buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, which was really crummy of them. Her son, Jasper, who I call Charlie because his real name makes him sound like he’s the twin brother of Casper the Ghost—I like him. A lot. Even if he doesn’t have hair. Since Charlie lives on the other side of evil Mrs. Klement, to visit his dead mother all he’d have to do is climb the black iron cemetery fence the same way Birdie and me do whenever we want to hang out over there. I don’t know where they ended up burying his mom, he doesn’t like to talk about it, but I know he has to take the #11 bus to bring her daffodils and that none of his sisters or brothers go with him because they are ashamed of their mother for killing herself. Charlie isn’t, he still loves her, so that makes me like him even more.

  And it’s not just in the Bible that dying is so popular! It’s all over the television shows. Unless someone gets poisoned or shot in the stomach, private detectives can’t solve the crimes so they’d be out of a job!

  In the matinee movies, death is VERY big too. In every monster movie ever made—The Blob or The Thing, for example—a lot of dying goes on. Even Mr. Walt Disney loves death. Look at what happened to Bambi’s mother, for godssakes!

  I check the clock next to Mom’s bed and talk quick because time is running out. “I’m alright to stay home this morning, but Robin Jean really, really needs to go with you to Daddy’s funeral because she doesn’t believe that….”

  Uh-oh.

  Mom stops powdering her freckled nose and says in a voice that’s so cold that I check for frost on the vanity mirror, “
Robin Jean doesn’t believe what?”

  This bothers me so much. Not taking my word on something is not Birdie’s regular personality. She usually believes everything I tell her.

  I laugh real fast and tell our mother, “Ahhh … never mind, it’s dumb,” because I gotta keep that secret between my sister and me. That would be dangerous information for our mother to have. “You know, Birdie.”

  I feel bad about razzing my sister, but I need to get Mom off this subject before she gets it in her head to give Birdie the third degree. My sister is not strong like me. One of the things I practice when I can’t sleep at night is imitating a brick wall, but Birdie will cave in to our mother’s torture faster than you can say Rumpelstiltskin.

  “Oh, I just love your earrings, by the way!” I say, because showering her with compliments works most of the time when I need to make her forget what she was talking about in the first place. “They match your eyes perfectly!”

  The pink powder pad she’s pressing against her chin moves along with her lips when she says, “Try all you want, Theresa, but you’re not going to get around me the way you could your father. Funerals are for grown-ups.”

  Unless you’re the dead kid.

  Birdie and I have watched tons of burials through the fence over the years, and a lot of them are small caskets because we can die of polio, but also scarlet fever can get us, and the German measles can attack the kids whose last names are Holzman or Kleinman, anything that ends in m-a-n. Ringworm can kill you too, so I’m a little worried about Charlie because that’s why he’s bald. He doesn’t seem bothered that worms ate all his hair, but getting something like that would make me suspicious about my scalp for the rest of my life. Your head is a big part of your body, land-mass wise. Since geography is one of my three best subjects in school, I know what I’m talking about. I get A’s in reading and spelling too. I also love to sing in the choir even though I have to do alto with the boys because of my very low voice that Tommy Aglietti kept telling everybody, “Finley sounds just like Froggy the Gremlin. Plunk your magic twanger, Finley,” until I punched him in the bread box. I hate arithmetic. And catechism. And Tommy Aglietti stinks too, and not only because his family eats a lot of this Wop spice called garlic to keep safe from vampires.

  Kids can get murdered too.

  There was a lot of gossip going around the neighborhood earlier this summer about the dead body of a little girl getting found next to the Washington Park lagoon which is not that far away from us. Maybe ten minutes. There was another dead girl the summer before that too, I think, I wouldn’t swear to it. I didn’t know the girl they found murdered next to the lagoon because she didn’t go to St. Catherine’s, a.k.a. St. Kate’s, she went to Mother of Good Hope, but our mother knew the mother of Sara Heinemann because they both went to Washington High School. When Mom read Birdie and me the story outta the newspaper, she didn’t seem too worried that we might get murdered too. She just folded the Sentinel up and said, “Don’t take any candy from strangers, Robin Jean.” That was good advice, for a change, because Birdie has a HUGE sweet tooth and will eat every candy that was ever created. If Jack the Ribber offered her black licorice, hard to believe, but she’d take it.

  Kids also get run over by cars, which is a good thing to remind my mother of.

  “You let us go to Dennis Patrick’s funeral.” He was a sixth grader at our school who got flattened by a Rambler on Appleton Avenue. The nuns at St. Kate’s made the whole school attend his funeral. They forced us to file past the casket and tell him something nice. If it was up to us, Birdie and me would laugh and give him the thumbs up. We had to practice looking sad for a whole half hour in the bathroom mirror the night before so when it was our turn to lean down and whisper something into Dennis Patrick’s dead ear—I’m sorry to have to report that Mr. Skank did a really nice job on covering the tire tracks—no more nasty rumors would get started about the “Finley ghouls.” What we ended up telling Dennis was, “Good riddance to bad rubbish, you little shit,” but with really sad looks on our faces. We were glad that the bully who knocked your mouth into the bubbler and would trip you on your way to the bathroom, and one time ambushed me in the alley and tried to pull off my Friday undies, was deader than a doornail. If Birdie, who is fragile, but also wiry, hadn’t snuck up and hit that moron with a rock between his shoulder blades, he woulda … he woulda … I don’t know what he woulda done. Why’d he want my Friday undies so bad? Not to give them to Goodwill the way Mom gave away Daddy’s things, that’s for sure. That kid didn’t have a charitable bone in his body even before it got run over.

  My mother closes her gold compact with a snap and says, “Hmmm …. I did allow you to go to the Patrick kid’s funeral, didn’t I. Good point.” She’s tapping her chin like she’s thinking over what I said and might let Birdie and me go with her after all, but I am no patsy. I don’t let my hope get up very often that she’s about to do something nice, not like my sister does. Mom is just putting out one of her traps. I know this because if you watch somebody long enough, you can pick up all their little tricks. She arches her right eyebrow when she’s about to spring something on me. “But you and your sister are not, I repeat, not going to your father’s funeral, Theresa. Period.”

  She gets busy then pulling on the black stockings with the seams past her pretty right knee. “Goddamn it,” she says. A runner sprang up around her ankle and raced up her calf. “Now see what you made me do?!”

  She stands up quick and takes a giant step toward me. I duck because I think she’s gonna give me one of her “love taps,” but she reaches over my shoulder and yanks open the top drawer of her bureau, where she keeps her unmentionables.

  I tell her, “I’m sorry. I’ll go call Gammy for money,” and then, since Daddy’s not here anymore to tell her how beautiful she is and somebody has to, I add on as I back outta the room, “You remind me so much of Greta Garbo,” because she’s a sucker for movie star compliments. Not all of ’em are true, but that one happens to fit her to a T. That actress always vants to be left alone too.

  I Gotta Get to the Bottom of This Once and for All

  TO-DO LIST

  Talk Mom into letting Birdie and me go to Daddy’s pretend funeral.

  Convince Birdie that Daddy really is dead so Mom won’t send her to the county insane asylum.

  If #1 and #2 don’t work out, find Daddy’s pretend grave in the cemetery when Mom isn’t around so Birdie can say goodbye to him once and for all because seeing really is believing.

  Decide if I should confess to the cops about murdering Daddy.

  Just because Mom already drove off in the woody looking sadly beautiful, that doesn’t mean that Birdie and me absolutely can’t go to Daddy’s pretend funeral. That’s why I crossed out #1 in pencil and not ink.

  St. Kate’s is only two blocks down and the Finley sisters are fast runners—you gotta be around here. We wouldn’t have to be careful about somebody seeing us on our way over there because EVERYBODY will be in those pews crying. Even Mrs. Gertrude Klement, our spying next-door neighbor wouldn’t be around to watch my every move and report it back to our mother. Once we got to the church, we’d have to be more careful. We could crawl on our tummies through the big doors like Apaches scouting out a wagon train. I love Indians. Chief exports: moccasins, pemmican, and scalps. I always root for them in the Western movies. They not only dress great, they’re really smart, and own tomahawks, which I’d love to get for a birthday present this year. Apaches wouldn’t be caught dead wearing red shorts when they’re trying to bushwhack pioneers because that’s a color that sticks out, so Birdie and me would have to change into our tan shorts. That way we could stay in a way-back pew that we’d blend into so nobody’d notice us. When it was all over, we’d leave the same way we came. Belly-crawling-Indian style.

  That’s a good plan, but not perfect, because in our neighborhood, the famous saying, “Mind your own beeswax,” is never true. Everybody is always buzzing around, watching each other,
just waiting for someone to slip up. So no matter how sneaky my sister and me were, one of the busybodies who are always looking to gather gossip to pass around with their cream-filled coffee cake at the next Pagan Baby Society meeting might get a bead on us. The news that the poor, fatherless Finley ghouls were at the pretend funeral would spread faster than a prairie fire. Our mother would have one of her temper tantrums. Not in church, of course. She cares too much what people think about her to do that. She’d wait until everyone went back to crying in their hankies before she lifted the veil on her black pill box hat and gave us a look that’d let Birdie and me know that as soon as she got home she’d try her hardest to make us sorry for being born. Daddy believed in sparing the child, but she believes in the belt, and sending us to bed without supper—a bad one for Birdie who doesn’t eat like her namesake. She eats like a pirate. Or maybe Mom will stop talking to us, which I don’t mind at all, but that’s hard on my sister too. And the other night when we didn’t take out the garbage fast enough, she told us she’d had it up to here and put us in the woody wagon and dropped us off at the park and didn’t come back for an hour. Birdie is very ascared of the dark.

  I’d put up with one of our her dumb punishments if seeing Daddy’s casket would help my sister, but I’m not sure a kid who reminds me sometimes of a stack of Pick-Up Sticks that might come tumbling down with one bad pull—could handle that right now on top of Daddy being dead.