The Undertaking of Tess

by Lesley Kagen

  Goddamn it, she’s foxy.

  Now Birdie and me are going have to wait until after it gets dark to pay our visit to the cemetery. And instead of using the back door, we’re gonna have to leave by the basement window on the other side of the house that buttinski Mrs. Klement can’t see from hers. This is gonna throw a monkey wrench into my plan because I love going over to the graveyard at night, but Birdie? She’s terrified of the dark.

  When Louise’s bed starts bouncing beneath me, I look over at my sister. She’s gotten up off her tummy and is jumping up and down. Uh-oh, just like I suspected earlier, she’s about to go wild-streaking. It looks like—I yell, “Birdie, NO!”—but I’m too late. She launches herself off the bed, flies through the air, and practically lands on top of Louise.

  God, I don’t know what gets into her sometimes! She knows our mother doesn’t like to be touched, but especially, after she’s all done up. She’s got Louise around the waist and is burying her adorable face in the folds of the green dress.

  Birdie says muffled, “You’re more beautiful even than … than … Ida Lupino.”

  “Oh, for crissakes,” Louise says as I pry my sister offa her. She swipes her hand down the front of her dress, checks to make sure that Birdie didn’t leave any stickiness on her backside, and is about to say something not nice when the sound of the ah … ooo … ga horn comes through the bedroom window again.

  “You better get going,” I say, very sincerely.

  She checks her face one more time, says, “Lights out at nine,” and is almost out the front door to land herself a new man and us a new daddy when she stops, turns around, and shakes her finger in my face. “Behave yourself, Theresa. I’ll give you and your sister the lickings of your life if I hear from Mrs. Klement that you left the house.”

  After she was done reading me the riot act, she turned on her high heels and disappeared through the front screen door. Birdie calls out to Louise as she sways toward the red car waiting for her at the curb, “We’ll do just what you told us to. And we promise to stay in the house. Cross our hearts and hope to die! I love you!” She presses her little ski-jump nose against the screen door and watches as Louise gets in the car, then she says to me in a softer voice, “That’s what we’ll do, okay, Tessie? No shenanigans.”

  I hate lying to her, so I cross my fingers behind my back before I make my eyebrows go up and down, pretend I’m smoking a cigar, and say in my very good Groucho voice that I know will make her laugh because she really loves that show, “You bet your life, little lady.”

  All Your Dreams Can Come True

  After I make Birdie and me the fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, and brownie frozen dinner for supper the way Louise told me to, we don’t sit down and dig in at the yellow kitchen table. We take the silver trays into the living room and eat in front of the television set.

  From across the way, I can feel Mrs. Klement’s beady eyes boring into my head like an outer space ray, but I refuse to look at her. She thinks she got the best of me. I’d choke on my chicken if I saw an I-beat-you-at-your-own-game look on her face.

  The only thing on TV is the news. They’re talking about Hawaii becoming a state again. Chief exports: pineapples and hula skirts and lepers. I get a little closer to the set because I don’t want to miss seeing some lepers because I am really interested in them. But all that comes up on the screen is a picture of something the newsman calls a loo ow. That must be what people who live in Hawaii call a party that they have on a very nice-looking beach. Everyone is wearing flowers around their necks and some dark-skinned ladies are making their hips shake around a pig with an apple in its mouth.

  When Birdie and me finish eating our supper, I turn the set off. She wants to know, “What shoes am I gonna wear to school tomorrow? Mine are all worn out.” And they give her blisters, but she doesn’t care about that. She just wants to look sharp. That’s very important to her. That’s another thing she musta inherited from Louise.

  I dust off the brownie crumbs from her mouth, pinch the X’s she made with the string, swoop them down the middle, and tell her, “I’m gonna stuff some newspaper into my loafers from two years ago. They’ll be fine for tomorrow, just don’t do lots of running at recess. I’ll remind Louise at breakfast to pick new ones up after her job.”

  After Birdie beats me in nine rounds of cat’s cradle, we play cards, her other specialty. Go fish and war. Everything I’m doing is about making her feel good. First food, and then these games that she always wins. The happier she is, the less afraid she’ll be to disobey our mother and go into the cemetery at night.

  When the streetlights finally pop on, that means it’s almost time to do my plan. I can’t ignore Mrs. Klement anymore the way I have been. I need to sneakily check out the living room window every few minutes to see if she’s still watching us. Her house is so close that I can see the black hairs growing outta of her ugly, pointy chin. She had her window open so she could try and hear what Birdie and me were talking about, but I closed ours so she couldn’t. I want to pull the curtains shut so bad, this would make everything so much easier, but if I do, she’ll report that to Louise, so all I can do for now is grin and bear Gert.

  I jump up off the plaid sofa, point to the clock that’s on top of the coffee table, and tell Birdie, “Oh, look at the time! Ya know what’s on right now? Walt Disney Presents!” This is her favorite show because she would very much like to live in “The Magic Kingdom.” Maybe that’s where we’ll go when we run away. “We missed most of it, but I bet you can catch the last part. I’ll do the dishes by myself, so don’t worry about that.”

  Birdie claps her hands and says, “Thank you, Tessie! It’s Bee’s favorite show too! Hurray!”

  It takes some time for the picture tube to warm up again, but after it does, and I find the right channel, Birdie and Bee get cozy, and I clear our dishes off the TV trays and take them into the kitchen. This is a smart move. This is what Indians do when they’re being followed. They split up so their enemy doesn’t know who to go after.

  Mrs. Klement can only see me in the kitchen if she cranks her neck really hard because that side of her house only has a small, high window that she has to use a stool to see out of. The reason I know what the inside of her house looks like is because I wait for her to go to the Red Owl on Thursdays when they give out the S&H Green Stamps, and then I push open her back hallway window that she can’t lock anymore because I jimmied it too many times with a screwdriver.

  When I crawl through the window of Gert’s house, sometimes I take the change off her bedroom bureau to buy candy for Birdie, but mostly I just move stuff around. I’ll hide a frying pan in her bed, or stick a toilet brush in her refrigerator, or change the hands on her clock because I’m trying to give her hardening of the arteries, which is what happens to old people instead of going crazy. I got the idea to play tricks on her brain after Birdie and me saw the Gaslight movie at the Tosa Theatre. Since cramping my style is her biggest hobby, I don’t feel bad at all about doing the same to her. Two days ago, the old poop had the nerve to tell Louise that she thought Mr. McGinty might be “too friendly” with me. What a crock. Everybody knows that a person can’t be too friendly, so maybe my tricks are finally paying off.

  In a way, I’m doing good for two other people too, because it’s not only my life that will be so much better when Gert goes off to the old folks’ home. She has a granddaughter named Lily who is so nice that I think the old witch must’ve bought her from gypsies. Lily drives all the way from downtown to spend every Sunday with Gert. The reason she has so much time on her hands is because she’s not married. Not because she’s ugly, she isn’t. She’s got a darling ducktail and a pretty figure and she dresses very cool. She told me once that she has a hard time meeting men because she’s very busy at her nursing job. So once Gert is out of the way? Lily will have every Sunday free to go on a date, and I got an idea who she could do that with.

  I check the clock above our stove. Splitting up from B
irdie, who’s still watching the TV, will only buy me a little time. Gert would never stay in her living room looking at my sister looking at the Walt Disney show for very long. She knows I’m the ring leader. She’ll come after me, but it will take her some time to pull the stool up to the window to watch what I’m up to because she’s got bad knees.

  I take the laundry pen out of the mess drawer in the kitchen to make a sign that I’m going to hold up to the living room window after I go back to be with Birdie. I write on the inside of the box the TV dinner came in.

  We’re taking our long baths now and then going to bed.

  Sweet dreams!

  That stinks. The first part is good, but that last part is too nice. That would make somebody who calls me, “The hellion,” suspicious. I fix it.

  We’re taking our long baths now and then going to bed.

  Sweet dreams! So why don’t you go sit on a screw driver and rotate?

  That’s much, much better. After I hold the sign up so she can see it, I’ll take it with me and leave it at the cemetery, that way when Mrs. Klement tells Louise tomorrow that I told her to screw herself, I can tell her, “What’s she talkin’ about? Sign? What sign?” Then I’ll put my hands on my cheeks and get a real hopeless look on my face. “Maybe you should call Lily to come and enroll her in the old folks’ home ASAP!”

  “Tessie?” Birdie calls from the living room. “It’s over!”

  I put the laundry pen back in the drawer, rinse the mashed potatoes off our forks, run into our bedroom to get my flashlight, and hurry to her.

  When I plop down on the sofa, she puts her head on my shoulder and says sorta dreamy, “Should we start our baths now like Louise said?” because that Disney show can do that to her.

  I answer, “I need you to do a favor for me first.” The reason I haven’t told her yet that I spotted Daddy’s pretend grave this afternoon is because I want it to be a surprise. A wonderful Gotcha! that she’ll never forget. “Remember when we were at the cemetery today?”

  She shivers. “That was a close call.”

  “Yeah, it’s good Louise didn’t catch us, but …,” I put on my saddest face, “something else really bad happened when we were over there.”

  Birdie gets up on her knees and says, “I know. We didn’t get the chocolate-covered cherries.”

  “Yeah, that was bad, but … something even worse.”

  “Oh, no, what?” she says like she can’t imagine anything worse than not getting the box of Stover’s off Mr. Lindley’s grave.

  “Daddy’s Swiss Army knife musta fallen outta my pocket when we were hiding from Louise behind the Gilgood mausoleum.” She knows that I have to have his knife. I can’t live without it, and I can’t sleep AT ALL unless it’s under my pillow with my lists. “I gotta go back and get it.”

  Birdie’s sad face is better than mine because hers is real. “But it’s nighttime, and Louise told us to stay in the house … no shenanigans.”

  Since I knew the dark would be a problem, I am more prepared than a Boy Scout. I pull the flashlight outta my shorts pocket and say, “But what about Daddy’s Swiss Army knife, Bird? What if somebody finds it and keeps it and … and we never see it again? I couldn’t stand it if….”

  I can fake cry, make real tears and everything, so that’s what I do, because as much as she’s ascared of our mother and the dark, she goes to pieces when I put my face in my hands and sob. It’s for her own good. And mine. I gotta cross out #4 on list.

  I peek out at Birdie between my fingers. She looks confused. I get worried for a second that she might say, “You go find Daddy’s knife and I’ll run our bath water,” but she throws her skinny little arms around me and says, “A course, I’ll go with you, Tessie. Please don’t cry.”

  I wipe my tears off with the back of my hand, snivel a little, and tell her, “Thank you, tweetheart. We’ll be quick, I promise.”

  She looks over at the house next door. “But what about Mrs. Klement? She’ll see us leave out the backdoor. What’re you gonna tell her?”

  “She won’t see us. We’re going out the basement window. And I’m not gonna tell her anything. I’m gonna stick this up in the window.” I pull the sign that I made in the kitchen out from behind my back. Birdie can’t read it, so I tell her that it says what I originally wrote before I made it better, “We’re taking our long baths now and then going to bed. Sweet dreams!”

  Birdie makes her amazed mouth. “Tessie, that’s so smart. Bee thinks so too!”

  I am beginning to like this imaginary friend more and more every second.

  A Maybe Miracle

  After I hold up the sign in our living room window, I don’t even wait to see how Gert reacts. I grab Birdie and we rush down the back steps into the basement. She won’t crawl out the window until I swipe the dead flies off the sill, but then she does great.

  When we come out on the side of the house that Gert can’t see, I think to myself that luck might be on our side tonight. Even if our nosey neighbor figured out that we weren’t taking our baths and hurried to check for us out her kitchen window, between the darkness, and Birdie and me wearing our black shorts and T-shirts, she wouldn’t be able to see us. And there aren’t any stars or a moon to light us up tonight either. I can smell rain in the air, and from far off, thunder booms. Daddy loved storms.

  Birdie and me get over the cemetery fence much easier than usual too, so things are really going smoothly. I’m leading the way and admiring the cemetery. It’s even more beautiful to me at night. Everyone tucked in and surrounded by all the love and flowers and presents that the people who miss them leave on their graves. It’s quiet, except for the frogs croaking at the pond, and a lightning fork in the sky that makes Birdie say, “I’m hungry.”

  I thought of this.

  “I brought you my brownie from dinner.” When I take it outta my pocket, I’m very careful not to let the Swiss Army knife really slip out.

  I decided not to tell Birdie the resurrecting idea because I had too many other ideas to work on, so I crossed it off my TO-DO LIST. Just finding Daddy’s pretend grave will have to be good enough for tonight. When we come around the corner of the mausoleum, I’m gonna throw his knife on the ground, bend over to pick it up, then pretend to notice his gravestone for the first time. “Birdie! Look!” I’ll say. “Eureka!” and then I’ll race ahead of her and shine the flashlight on the back of his gravestone so by the time she gets there it will be so believable that his soul is shining through.

  When we get closer to the mausoleum, I say, “What the Sam Hill …?!”

  I have never, ever seen this many fireflies. There’s a swarm of them lighting up this whole part of the cemetery.

  Birdie laughs, claps her hands, and is the happiest I have seen her in the longest time. “Bee says she called the fireflies to show us the way to Daddy.” She stops and listens to what her imaginary friend is telling her. “He’s right over there.” She points two graves down from the Gilgood mausoleum, which is exactly where he is.

  Holy Jehoshaphat! This … this is better than Our Lady appearing to the kids at Fatima!

  Or else Birdie and me really have gone off our rockers.

  When the lightning cracks right above our heads, I jump almost outta my skin, but usually nervous Birdie doesn’t even seem to notice. She’s gone ahead without me and is almost to Daddy’s grave.

  “Wait … wait for me,” I shout, and hurry to catch up.

  I fumble with my flashlight so I can light up his stone the way I was planning to so she thinks his soul is coming out of it, but when I get up next to her, I don’t have to. There already is a beautiful, golden light shimmering out of the grave of:

  Edward Alfred Finley

  Rest in Peace

  Born September 2, 1931 — Died August 1, 1959

  The light grows and grows and rises up to surround Birdie and me.

  My sister laughs, hugs and kisses the gravestone, and says, “Hi, Daddy. It’s me and Tessie! Hello! Hello!”
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  We tell him what’s been going on since he’s been gone—the same way other visitors do when they come by to talk to their dearly departed—until we’re almost washed away by the pouring-down rain. Birdie, with the shimmering golden grave light all around her and the lightning cracking across the sky and the wind forcing the trees to bend at their waists, stands up and says, like she’s the boss instead of me, “Tessie and me gotta go now Daddy before we get electrocuted, but we’ll come back and see you soon,” then she grabs my hand and we slosh toward the cemetery fence.

  I boost Birdie over first, and when it’s my turn to climb, the sign that I made for Mrs. Klement that I shoved down in my shorts pokes me in the back. I gotta get rid of it so there’s no evidence that she can use against me. I stop at the top of the fence, hold up the sign, and let the wind rip it outta my fingers.

  I’m not sure how long we’ve been gone, but I think longer than we shoulda been. The lights are still out in the house, so Louise hasn’t come home from her date yet. Even if she was standing out on the back porch waiting for us, Birdie and me would gladly follow her into the house and take whatever stupid punishment she’d come up with because what happened to us at the cemetery? I don’t know what the hell it was—a maybe miracle … a mirage … or something that kids see when they lose all their marbles—all I know is nothing that Louise could do would make us sorry about tonight.

  Birdie and me are smiling like crazy at each other while we take our baths, towel each other off, scrub the tub, lay out our uniforms, put on our nighties, and slip under the sheet. We haven’t talked too much about what we saw. I think because that famous saying, “Seeing is believing,” really is true. We’re lying in the dark, holding hands, breathing, and listening to the rain beating against our bedroom window.