Late Stories

by Stephen Dixon

  I have no one, really, to bring flowers to his or her grave. My parents and two of my siblings are buried in a cemetery on Long Island—I think in Suffolk County. I know it was way out there on the island, so it couldn’t be Nassau County. And it’s my sister who’s buried there; my brother’s gravestone is a cenotaph. He was on a freighter that sent out distress signals during a violent storm in the North Atlantic more than fifty years ago and must have sunk. I forget the cemetery’s name. I know it has a “mountain” in it—maybe Sinai or Nebo. It’s been almost twenty years since I’ve been to it. To get there I took the Long Island Expressway and drove for about an hour on it. It was for my mother’s burial. I was with my wife and daughters. And shortly after I passed a huge sod farm on my right—this is what I was told to look out for—I took the next exit to a wide boulevard that had a number of cemeteries and flower stores and a diner on it. Jewish, Catholic, and two veterans cemeteries and a couple of others. I remember that all the graves in the veterans cemeteries were in neat rows and most of them had little American flags on them. It was around Memorial Day, so probably that was why. I doubt I’ll ever go out there again. I’m sure I won’t. I don’t see the point. I’d look at the graves for a few minutes, less if it was very cold out, and leave. I don’t pray and I wouldn’t read from some little prayer book they’d offer me in the cemetery office when I’d go in there to get the location of the graves, and I know the burial site is taken care of. My father paid for that a long time ago and it was good, he said, for another fifty years. He was proud of the arrangement he made with the cemetery for so little money. Although it wouldn’t bother me if the site isn’t taken care of and the graves are grown over. I have no idea what the names of the cemeteries are where my grandparents are buried. All four of them were dead before I was born, or maybe my mother’s father died a year or two after. Anyway, I never knew them. I know that both cemeteries are in Queens—close to the Queensboro Bridge, I think it is, and the East River. It must be around seventy years since I went to them. My mother took us kids by cab to the cemetery her parents were in. My father didn’t want to go, I remember my mother saying years after, or maybe was too busy working that day. Another time, and this time we went by car and my father drove, the whole family went to a cemetery close to the one my mother’s parents were in, to visit the graves of my father’s parents and two of his brothers, who died very young of diphtheria, I think, though it also could have been of influenza during the great epidemic back then. The trip to the cemetery was also around seventy years ago. I can picture all of us kids squished into the rear seat, though that image could have come from any number of times we were in the car together. A Plymouth. We always had Plymouths. “The Jewish Chevrolet,” my father called it, though I’m not really sure why. I think my father paid a lump sum for the upkeep of his parents’ gravesite—“In perpetuity,” I can hear him say, making it into a funny-sounding word. And the Thayer Family Circle, as my mother and her eight brothers and sisters called themselves when they and their spouses met at one of their homes twice a year to have a buffet dinner and discuss family business, paid for the upkeep of their parents’ gravesite. I don’t know if they got the same kind of arrangement my father did for his parents’ gravesite and my family’s. If they didn’t and because all my aunts and uncles on my mother’s side of the family are dead, I don’t know who’s looking after it, if anyone is.

  I do visit the gravesite, I suppose I can call it, of my wife almost every day. For sure I see it every day, especially now that it’s late fall and most of the leaves are down. It’s right outside the house, underneath a star magnolia tree inside the circular driveway. She was cremated and some of her remains—I don’t want to use the word “cremains”; it just doesn’t feel right as a word—were put in a cylindrical container, about fourteen inches long, I bought for them when I arranged for the cremation at a local funeral home. The funeral director I dealt with told me only some of the cremains—that was the word he used repeatedly till he switched to “remains” and “ashes,” I guess out of respect to me—would be in the container but none of the bones. I thought of asking why no bones, but it seemed like an insolent, almost smart-alecky question. Not that so much, but just wrong. This was the same day she died. Only hours after her body was picked up by the funeral home and driven away not in a hearse but in an unmarked van. He said the furnace she’d be cremated in would be swept clean—“every last particle”—as it would for the body cremated in the furnace before her. I said “You have more than one furnace?” and he said “Only one. It’s enough.” I asked how much of her remains would be in the container? “Certainly not all,” and he said “Approximately two potting trowelfuls.” “What happens to the rest of her remains and what’s left of her bones—excuse me; I’m just curious,” and he said “They’re disposed of in the most dignified manner to the deceased.” I think that’s how he worded it. “We just don’t throw them out.” I didn’t want to go any further in asking “Where? Is there a disposal area for all the remaining cremation remains?” Again, I thought to, but sensed—knew—it would sound peculiar, if not a little crazy, not that I couldn’t have gotten away with that, as I was already a mess, breaking down several times in his office. How I got to even ask what I did and sign a number of documents handed to me across his desk—I really didn’t read them at all. I kept saying “I’ll take your word. I’ll take your word”—I don’t know. And I know I wanted to give him my credit card and pay up and get out of there fast as I could. There was also an awful smell in the room—and I can’t describe it any better—that I’d never smelled before and which seemed to get stronger the longer I was there. I felt it had to come from the furnace that was probably, or could be near this office. That this was the cremation office we were in, where only cremation business took place. I thought of asking him that too—“What am I smelling?”—but held back. I thought he’d say something like “What smell? I don’t smell anything,” and maybe call in an associate and say “You smell anything unusual in here?” and this person would sniff a bit and say “Nothing. Why?” The office was also warmer than I thought an office like this would usually be. I could almost swear to it, and of course I thought this also came from the furnace being so near, but I didn’t say anything about it either. As I said, I just wanted to finish up and get in my car and drive home.

  So I dug a hole outside my house, even before I went back to the funeral home two days later to pick up the container of ashes—a hole deep enough to put the container in the ground vertically. I filled up the hole around and on top of it with the earth I’d dug up and patted it down with the shovel. Then I put twenty-one stones around it, no stone more than a couple of inches long, in two concentric circles—the outer one of thirteen stones, inner one of seven, and an almost perfectly round stone in the center, the smallest of the twenty-one. All the outer-circle stones are larger than the inner-circle ones. That was intentional. I thought the arrangement of stones would look better that way. But the numbers have no significance. It just came out to be thirteen and seven and twenty-one after I’d made the circles and counted all the stones. The stones were chosen from a bucket of about fifty of them collected over the years by my wife and me and my daughters. We got them from the same Maine beach almost every summer, where there were thousands of them piled on top of one another, none larger than a small fist, it seemed. Then only my daughters and I got them because my wife was in a wheelchair and couldn’t get close to the beach. She’d say before we went down to it “Try to get only the smoothest stones. So take your time. I’ll be fine.” Later, when we’d bring a few stones each to her, she’d say, “Beautiful. Every last one of them. Now comes the hardest part. Which ones should we give back? Because we already have a lot in Baltimore. You choose. I love them all.” The last time we were at this beach—just my wife and I. Our daughters couldn’t start their two-week vacations yet from work and I also think it was our last summer in Maine—there were posted signs there saying something
like to prevent further erosion of such and such beach—I forget its name—removing stones, driftwood and other sea matter from the shore is prohibited by law. “They’re right,” she said. “Lucky we got what we did when it was still acceptable, you can say, and permitted. Though now I feel guilty about all the stones we have at home. Next summer—and I’m serious; you have to remind me about this—we should bring back most of the stones we have, since they’re not doing anything sitting in a bucket year to year. You can still fetch me a few today. But only to look at and feel and rub against my cheek, and then we’ll throw them back. Or just stick them back in the water, since they might break on other stones if they’re thrown.”

  So where was I in all this? Flowers. That I have no grave, really, to put them on, unless I consider the area the container’s in one. And why shouldn’t I? My wife’s remains are buried in the ground. There’s a monument of sorts above it, though not inscribed, of course, though I could probably do something like that. And I treat it like a grave. I keep weeds from growing around the stones. In the fall I brush leaves and larger accumulations of pine needles off it. In the winter I brush away the snow. I sometimes say silly things while I do this. Like: “I don’t want you to be cold,” when I remove the snow. “Or maybe you’ll be warmer with the snow covering you. No, I’ll get rid of the snow.” I’ve never put flowers on the stones. I should do that today. Just to do something different with her grave, I’m going to settle on calling it. I’m inside the house now. Do it, I think. Just don’t say you will. I put on my jacket and cap and go outside. The only flowers around—a month earlier, there were plenty—are the tea roses, I’m almost sure they’re called, right outside one of the kitchen windows, the one above the sink. Pink flowers that look like miniature roses but don’t seem to smell. Maybe I haven’t breathed them in hard enough. I could go to the flower store in the little village shopping area about a half mile from here, but why bother, and why pay for flowers when they’re right here? My wife used to quote an Eliot poem about roses in the snow in winter. I forget the line. I really don’t remember ever remembering it and I don’t know what poem it’s in. Could be in the Four Quartets. That sounds right. Which quartet, though, I haven’t a clue. But I know it was by Eliot because she said it was the times she quoted it, and she knew poetry as well as anyone, it seemed. She loved the line. Used to smile when she said it.

  So I cut several roses off the bush with the pruning shears, hold them by their stems carefully so I don’t prick myself, smell them and I still can’t get a smell out of them, and lay them out on the stones. Again, I don’t know why. Maybe because—did I say this?—I’ve never put flowers there before. Never put flowers on any grave before, and it seems I should have with this one. I think my daughters did once or twice. And then they must have removed them after they’d been there a long time or the dried flowers blew away if they didn’t get washed away by the rain before they dried. So many of my actions since she died have been for no good reason. I just think of doing it and do it and wonder why I did it. Maybe I should have put the flowers in a bud vase. There are a couple of them in the house, in a bottom kitchen cabinet where all the vases of various sizes are—several of the larger ones were delivered with flowers in them soon after she died—and stand it up in the ground between the inner circle of stones and the stone in the center. Put water in the vase before I put the flowers in it and stand it up in the ground wedged between two stones. Why? Why’s that better than laying the flowers across the stones? Did I say it was better? No. I was just wondering, that’s all. I step back and look at the grave. Looks pretty. Pink flowers and gray stems against the mostly white and light-gray stones. So I did something now I’ve never done, or don’t think I have. What of it? I say “I’m going to be silly again, my darling, and talk a little to you. It’s about your grave. I put flowers on the marker, which is made solely of stones gathered by us and the kids at Schoodic Point. Remember how we used to go there almost every summer when we were in Maine? Spend about an hour there, just looking at the water, and then go to the beach near the point where all the polished stones were, collect a few of what we thought were the best ones, and then go to the same restaurant in town closest to the point. Great fishburgers and haddock and chowder and cole slaw. Nothing better. We always looked forward to that lunch. Fried clams and French fries and lobster and crab rolls and onion rings too. ‘Anybody hungry?’ I’d say. ‘Yeah’ we all said, or the kids and I did; you usually said ‘You bet.’ I’ve mentioned this before, how one of my most repeated expressions for years became one of yours, when you’d never said it before, to the point where I stopped saying it anymore. Anyway, a cylindrically-shaped container of your remains is under the grave marker, which is solely composed of these ocean-polished beach stones. Just what you wanted to hear, I know. They’re in the best container the funeral home had, or the better of the two I chose to choose from. And I’m not telling you this to show what a sport your husband was. Both choices I had were made of strong cardboard, or maybe some other paper product even stronger, though both would eventually disintegrate in the ground, the funeral director said. But the container I got will last around ten years, compared to the cheaper container, which would fall apart in a year, he said. It could be he was telling me this to jack up the cost of the cremation. I was, as I’m sure most grieving spouses are, especially on the same day their husband or wife died—vulnerable—more easily persuadable and he of course knew that and took advantage of it, although maybe he was leveling with me. I want to be fair. Just going over the choices, not pushing me. I really forget. He seemed okay, though that could be part of their act too: sympathy and sincerity. I didn’t mean to get into all that. But to finish: there was also a steel container, cylindrically-shaped and same length and dimensions of the other containers. But I was just shown a photograph of it, unlike the others, and I never considered buying it, vulnerable as I said I was. When I heard the price—I’ll be honest with you—I said ‘No way. Not worth it.’ Or just shook my head. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned this. Because steel could have been what you wanted, though we never talked about it. All we talked about for either of us was cremation or burial, and we both went for cremation. We never talked about what we’d do with the remains, though. The steel one, by the way, came to more than a thousand dollars, while the one I got cost about two hundred. And the flimsiest container … well, price never came up. I doubt they even charge for it. It’d come with the ashes, I’d think, because they’d have to put them in something when they gave them to you. They can’t just stick them in a paper bag for you to take home. I also remember thinking at the time that the stronger of the two cardboard containers was better than the steel one. Not because it was way less expensive but because it’ll disintegrate and become part of the earth, like ashes will, while the steel container will probably stay steel forever, or something close to that. I wouldn’t want the next owner of the house, meaning after I die and the kids sell it, since I doubt they’ll want to live there or keep it. Or the owner after that owner—in other words, someone we don’t know and who doesn’t know about the ashes we have buried out there—digging in that area one day and coming upon the steel container and wondering what it is. Unless he’s in the funeral business, I doubt he’d know. And maybe even think there could be something valuable inside—jewels, coins: who knows?—and try to open it, though I think those things are sealed for good. Even the container I got is apparently unopenable once it’s sealed, unless you want to tear through it with a saw or butcher’s knife. You see what I mean, though, right? But enough. Too much, in fact. I shouldn’t talk like this, though I know you can’t hear me. Though if you can, and of course you can’t, then know that I’m now going to stop talking as if I’m talking to you and weed the few weeds on your grave marker and then go inside.” I get down on one knee, weed the grave marker and a little of the area around it, and go inside the house. The pruning shears. I don’t remember putting them back in the pail in the carport with t
he rest of the smaller gardening tools. But I don’t want to go outside again today. I’ll look for it tomorrow. I’d hate to have misplaced it. It was very expensive, for a clipper, and very useful, and the best of the three or four I have.

  Just What Is

  He sees her at a restaurant. He’s with his two closest friends and she’s sitting down with an older woman and a child three tables away. He says to the couple “Someone I know. My favorite grad student, ever. Haven’t seen her since before Abby died. That’s how I divide things in my life. B.A. and A.A. Excuse me,” and he gets up and goes over to her. “Oh my goodness,” she says, and stands up and puts her arms out and they hug. “You remember him,” she says to the woman. “My old writing professor. Philip Seidel. You met at the reception after the diploma ceremony. Jesus. Almost fourteen years ago.” She introduces him to her mother and says the child is her sister’s son. “I have him for two weeks while she’s in China.” He says “How you doing, and how’s Claude?” and she says “We’re in the midst of getting a divorce.” “I’m sorry,” and she says “Don’t be. It’s fine. But also don’t tell me you thought we were the last couple on earth to ever get divorced.” “Why would I? What do I know what’s going on between two people, married or not?” “Hey,” she says. “I heard from Whitney and Evelyn that the launch event for your new book at the Ivy was a smash.” “You mean a debacle.” “No, they said you had a big crowd, more people than chairs, and the pieces you read were perfect and the Q and A went well too. I wanted to go but I was teaching that night. I haven’t bought the book yet but I will.” “Don’t bother. You know … sometimes I think my work’s only meant to be written, not read. I’d send you a copy, because the publisher did such a beautiful job on it—the looks. I just know they’re going to win design awards for it—but I only have two left, one with the corrections to all the typos and the other to keep in pristine shape in my bookcase. I can also imagine how busy you must be with everything and also have lots on your mind. How are your kids?” “They’re taking it pretty well.” “That’s good. Listen,” he says, “we should meet for lunch or just for coffee one day.” “I’d like that. Let me get your phone number.” “First one to pull out his pen gets to call the other,” and he takes a pen out of his pants pocket, piece of folded-up paper out of his pants back pocket and says “So give it.” She does and then says “After the holidays. I am pretty busy till then.” “After. That’d be great. Can’t wait. Lunch, so we have enough time to talk.” They hug, he says to her mother “Nice to meet you again. And you too, little guy,” to her nephew. “What are you going to have for lunch?” and the kid says “Chicken salad sandwich.” “Good choice,” and he goes back to the table. “Sorry for holding you up,” he says to the couple. “She was maybe the best student writer I ever had, and it was such a treat seeing her again. I loved having her in my class and fought off my colleagues to be her advisor. She didn’t say anything about Abby. Maybe she was being discreet. Or I have seen her since Abby died, but a while ago. That must be the case. And I think I even remember getting a condolence card from her, none of which I ever thanked the senders for. She looks a lot like Abby, wouldn’t you say? Though that’s not why I always liked her.” The woman says “Abby was gorgeous. This woman’s only cute.”