by Ava Finch
After an hour of doodling and pencil tapping, the pad on her knee still hasn’t got more than a few words on it. She hears her name called from below and leans over the railing to see Ky on the sand, shaking Dot’s handbag. “Guess what’s in here?”
“Shhh. Mom’s asleep. What are you doing with Gran’s purse?”
“Looking for extra house keys. C’mon. Guess.”
“I don’t know, Ky.” Though she can guess: the same essentials that have always been in Dot’s handbags tucked into their proper pockets. When Gran would say, “Get Gran’s purse, RayBee,” she always knew she was in for some small gift—anything from a single wrapped peppermint to a found agate, a shiny fifty-cent piece or crisp five-dollar bill. The handbags were always the clasping kind, never zippers (they only break) or buckles (who has that kind of time?). The contents invariably included a hankie, Life Savers that tasted like perfume, a coin purse, plastic rain hat, and Rolaids that smelled like perfume—odd since Gran never wore any.
“Note?” RayAnne bolts forward and leans over the rail. “Is it a note?”
Ky makes a face. “No. Sorry. Not even close.” He snaps it open to show a large baggie, tightly packed with a mossy green herb. Even from the balcony the smell is unmistakable.
“Weed? You’re kidding me.”
“Medicinal, I s’pose.”
“Oh.” RayAnne frowns. “For what? Nausea, you think?”
“Maybe. Or not. It hardly matters now, does it?” He’s got Gran’s picnic hamper and a blanket folded over his arm as well. “C’mon, I’ve packed munchies and rented a dune buggy. It’s out front.”
“I have to write the eulogy.”
“Bring it.” Ky points to the yellow legal pad. “We’ll do it together.”
Empty Tupperware containers litter the beach blanket. Ky’s index finger plows through the contents of one.
“What was that again?” RayAnne licks her lips.
“Chive and cheddar mashed potatoes.” He transfers a glob from his finger to hers and she plugs her mouth with it.
“I can feel my underpants getting tighter.”
“Some suicide note, huh?”
“Leave it to Gran.” RayAnne peers into a container. “I think I know exactly what she meant by this mango chutney.”
They both find this hilarious. An old man walking his dog looks over and smiles. “Something must be funny.”
“Our grandmother.” RayAnne swallows a giggle and blurts, “Just died.” She and Ky both crack up with laughter.
After the old man walks on, she feels bad and would chase him down to explain, but she could not get up if she wanted to.
Ky looks to the almond toffee biscotti in his hand and says, “You think you’re baked?”
Managing not to sob, she tells her brother everything that’s happened over the last three long days, from the first phone call to walking away from Dot on the hospital terrace. She relays it all in disorder, all the while digging a large hole in the sand with a plastic spoon still sticky from a dessert called “ambrosia.” After finishing, she looks up to Ky’s face, flat with grief.
She’s thought of no one and nothing but Gran or herself all this time, just now realizing how frustrating it must have been for Ky, held captive by the blizzard. She takes his sandy hand. “Guess it’s sucked for you too.”
“Not the best of snow days.”
“Remember before you could spell and you wrote that letter to the Abdominal Snowman, begging him to send a blizzard to Edina? Gran kept it. I saw it in one of her scrapbooks. And that rain dance you’d modified for snow, when we were powwowing for school to close?”
“Yeah, well, we finally got the mother of all blizzards, didn’t we?”
When he’d gotten RayAnne’s message, he recruited a neighbor to watch the twins in exchange for his seats at the first NHL playoff. Once at the airport, he watched as flight after flight was canceled. Ingrid barely made it home on the last flight from Newark, but he wouldn’t go home with her in case some flight going to anywhere might take off. When his phone battery quit, he’d begged strangers to use their phones, but having never memorized RayAnne’s number, stood in the middle of the concourse holding a stranger’s phone and uselessly repeating “call RayAnne” at it until the person eased it from his hand and backed away.
He had found a pay phone and tried to track down Big Rick, who obviously had not gone back to Arizona. When Ky reached Rita, she had been boiling. “If he shows up here, you’ll know about it, because the headlines will read ‘Lying Bastard Slapped to Death.’”
He’d discovered their father was at Hawthornden after actually listening to his older phone messages from Big Rick; one was a week old, asking him to come to some event called Family Day. He’d been checked in since the day after the debacle on Location. On the day of the blizzard, he was just gearing up to sign himself out and embark on the ninety meetings in ninety days routine.
“Apparently that Hal guy picked him up from rehab and drove him to the airport.”
RayAnne dropped her sandy spoon. “He did what?”
“And Dad made him promise not to tell you, by the way. He’s been calling the cottage; you’re going to have to listen to the messages.”
“Drove him . . . ?” Ray grows quiet, prying her sandy toes apart with the plastic spoon.
Down the beach they can see their father wading in the shallow surf, his pants rolled up, Trinket under his arm.
Ky takes the spoon from her. “Dad promised Gran he’d go to Hawthornden. After she heard about the blowup on Location, she put her foot down and made him promise to quit drinking for good.”
“And?”
“He says he has.”
“For the moment,” RayAnne grunts.
“Well, he’s not drinking this minute, right? Can you maybe give him credit for that?”
“Sure, until he starts again.”
Ky gets up and starts collecting empty containers. “Fair enough. Until he starts again—and in the meantime, you might remember he’s just lost his mother?”
“Where you going?”
“Ingrid and the boys. Their flight lands in an hour.”
Though the motel room has two queen beds, RayAnne curls like a seahorse next to Bernadette. When RayAnne cries, her mother cries, endlessly smoothing her temples, saying, “That’s it, honey.” Or “Cry it out.”
RayAnne takes five baths in two days, various bits of Dot’s Tupperware lining the edge of the tub, morsels of food dropping now and then to bloom in the water. Meringue cookies float. Lemon bars do not. When not soaking, she’s within handcuff range of Bernadette, who lends RayAnne a caftan. They walk endless miles up and down the beach, billowing like jibs.
Ky brings more food from Dot’s kitchen and they stuff the kitchenette’s dorm-sized fridge. They heat things in the microwave or eat them cold while sitting on the balcony, staring at the waves. If Eat Something! was Dot’s deathbed directive, and RayAnne is doing her best to oblige, even when not remotely hungry, as if chewing might wring forth Gran.
She stays clear of Big Rick, whom she assumes is busy taking care of details like the funeral or Dot’s will; the donation of her body had already taken place—there will be no remains, no cremains in the urn Dot picked out for herself. It will be filled with steel-cut oats instead, Bernadette’s idea. Other than going once to the cottage to get Dot’s wedding suit and the honeymoon album, she hasn’t seen her father. According to Ky, he’s been dragging Trinket around like a stuffed toy, half the time using her as a handkerchief.
“Dot would like the idea,” Bernadette says, snapping off a thread with her teeth, “of you wearing this.” All the buttons have been shifted over half an inch to fit RayAnne. Her mother holds open the jacket. “Arms, sweetie.”
Bernadette took care of the obituary, but they’ve gotten nowhere on writing the eulogy
. The day before on the beach with Ky, she’d been too stoned to hold a pencil. Ky’s been working it over on the little motel table while RayAnne sits dumbly next to him. They’ve spent the afternoon hashing over what words to honor Gran with, knowing full well that words won’t cut it.
When not blinking at the laptop screen or mindlessly picking at the hem of her borrowed caftan, she focuses on the Morandi painting Ky had toted over, thinking it might cheer her. She pulls a thread from the hem, half listening to Ky mutter as though through a shell.
The painting does help. Looking at it, RayAnne muses that she now owns something she’ll never part with, despite Dot’s frequent directives to one day sell it: “Buy a nice house, or put your children through college if you ever uncross your legs long enough to have some. Maybe start a business, like a bakery or dress shop. Why are you laughing?”
RayAnne’s gaze triangulates between the painting, the window, and the glowing screen on Ky’s laptop. Each is neatly bordered by frames and edges, unlike the edgelessness of loss, which seeps and spills, blurring across everything.
Their mother has offered to read the eulogy at the service. RayAnne wonders what, if anything, their father might have to add.
Ky reports Big Rick has found an AA group at a nearby Shriners temple, and he attends two meetings a day, driving back and forth in the rented golf cart.
Bernadette sits in her makeshift seamstress-yogini corner, where she’s now taking down the dual hems of Dot’s skirt and its silk lining to accommodate RayAnne’s longer legs. Occasionally she will offer up a platitude in hopes of helping with the eulogy. Mostly they just blink away her suggestions until Ky loses patience and rubs his face, muttering, “Mom. No more Kahlil Gibran or Thai Buddhist monk stuff. Gran wasn’t . . . woo-woo.”
For the first time in days, RayAnne gives way to a smile; her grin is tight with disuse.
What can she write? Even the rosemary breadstick in her hand dipped in roasted red pepper puree holds no inspiration; though she understands it to be delicious, she’s not really tasting much—mostly the food evokes memories, which she supposes is the point. Many times RayAnne helped Gran prepare the puree, standing at the grill and turning the glossy peppers over the coals until they blackened and collapsed on themselves. The dish has all of three ingredients—the soft, fleshy peppers, olive oil, and salt—that all make a scarlet vortex in the food processor.
That was Gran, she thinks. Like the puree—simple, uncomplicated. When Ky heads to the bathroom with an issue of Wired, she plops over into his chair and bends over the keyboard. She inhales mightily and, in what seems like one exhalation, types a flurry of lines, fingers flying. By the time the toilet flushes and Ky comes out of the bathroom smelling like the Glade PlugIn and hotel soap, she’s tapped the last period of a decent paragraph.
She grabs her beach towel.
“Hey, where you going?”
“For a walk.”
“Hang on.” Bernadette parks her needle in the fabric of the skirt. “I’ll just be a minute.”
But RayAnne is gone, the door shutting behind her. She’s nearly to the water by the time her mother catches up. They sit on the dune and for several minutes, and both just stare at the ocean.
RayAnne makes a square frame of her fingers and blinks through it to the horizon. “What is the point anyway? I don’t see it.”
“Point of what?”
“Life. The point?”
“Oh. That’s grief talking now.” After a beat, Bernadette scoops up a palmful of sand, sifts it between her fingers, and says perhaps the only appropriate thing there is to say, paraphrasing Old Lodge Skins: “Your eyes still see. But your heart no longer receives it.”
NINETEEN
While Kyle and Ingrid take the twins shopping for funeral clothes, RayAnne is led on another walk by Bernadette. After pulling the pedometer from folds in her caftan, she proudly reports that in the last three days they have logged thirty-two miles, which explains RayAnne’s aching calves. Her mother is a big believer in the meditative quality of walking. When retreating with her mavens, she deviously leads them the long way around to every shrine and holy well on their itinerary. She allows them to get lost, meaning they must tromp an extra mile or more between their taxing routines of yoga sessions and emotive Blood-Tide rituals. After climbing sacred ruins and mincing over miles of ancient cobblestone or jungle paths, they collapse into the beds of their yurts or deluxe tree houses to sleep the sleep of zombies, snoring right through their own hot flashes and night sweats. RayAnne is aware Bernadette has been walking her ragged in the same manner and doesn’t mind; exhaustion is helping her sleep.
When grief pulls the rug of momentum out from under her, she sinks to the nearest dune or patch of sea grass. She will turtle into her borrowed caftan, closing her eyes and burnishing one foot with the other like rubbing a genie’s lamp. As she drifts, she clings to a very early memory: she was three years old at most, sitting in Gran’s lap after swimming—the physicality of this memory is intense, tugging her back in time like some elastic nerve, Gran’s chin powdery and soft on her bare shoulder, the whole of RayAnne small enough to tuck into Gran’s curve as she clasps RayAnne’s feet to warm them. This one recollection has been housed in her body for over thirty years.
For a while there is nothing but that memory. In her sunlit cocoon of batik cotton, she is just a pair of small feet nestled in her grandmother’s warm hands.
The day of the funeral dawns breezy and cool. From the balcony, RayAnne watches puffy clouds roll while eating Dot’s butterscotch pudding, which contains actual Scotch. The service isn’t until late afternoon, with the reception slated for happy hour. Leave it to Dot.
At two o’clock, she dresses in her new Walmart bra and panties, carefully slipping into Dot’s sleeveless silk top. She raises her arms to see how stubbly her armpits are and shrugs—she has no razor of her own, and Bernadette hasn’t shaved since the Reagan administration. Zipping and buttoning herself into Dot’s garments, she absently notes there’s room after all. In fact the waistband is actually loose, which under different circumstances might incite joy.
Not even for Dot will she endure pantyhose or heels, so she laces her bare feet into a pair of rubber-soled glittery gold Keds found on the sale shelf of the local Foot Locker. In the mirror, the overall effect is as if she’s dressed for a Mr. Rogers memorial.
Bernadette steps behind and tugs smooth the shoulders of the jacket. “You look so like her.”
“Do I?”
Her mother is outfitted in the gauzy sari worn during her rituals, pure as an unused tampon. White, in Bernadette’s personal wiccanry, signifies the ceasing of the menses and the stanch of the flow. Of course, it’s also the color of mourning in many cultures. The wreath of tiny white orchids in her hair is a ringer for the one worn by the Mother Nature of old margarine commercials.
They walk to the cottage to meet Ky, Ingrid, Big Rick, and the twins. No one says much as they file out to join the small knot of people silently gathered at Dot’s gate. Big Rick holds Trinket; the topknot of fur between her ears has been clumsily done up in a black satin bow. Small things are beginning to penetrate RayAnne’s caul of mourning to allow the present to register—the image of her father fumbling a satin ribbon with his ham-hands gives her pause.
They all line up behind a lone jazz trumpeter. RayAnne immediately recognizes him as the elder-cabbie, Enrico Zagate. All commence walking slowly as he plays “What a Wonderful World” in a mournful key, moving at about the same tempo as the song. They slow at the doors of various cottages, and Dot’s neighbors come out to weave themselves into the procession. All seem well versed in the choreography of farewells. Enrico changes tunes as they continue on. By the time they reach the last lane, they are forty people swaying to the tune of “St. James Infirmary.” A few go only as far as the gate, but most continue on to the motorcade of four limos and twelve golf carts swag
ged with black netting. Mr. D.’s cart is the first in line. Once Mr. Zagate puts down his trumpet, the only sounds are the doors of the limos opening and shutting and the putt-putt motors of golf carts idling. RayAnne wonders if all funerals at the village commence so appropriately.
RayAnne is surprised to see the parking lot of the church is nearly full. Dot had chosen the most unchurchlike church she could find, a blond brick Unitarian A-frame with cubist stained glass. The few adornments inside are a stainless steel chalice and a Danish-modern altar. Pews are packed shoulder to shoulder. At Dot’s request there are no flowers, but an abundance of white candles flicker across every surface. Family members are led to the front by ushers that RayAnne cannot help but notice are all quite short, almost Doc-and-Sneezy short; all are over sixty with the statures of ten-year-old boys. When one goes up on his tippy toes to pat Big Rick’s shoulder, his bright red socks are revealed, and RayAnne realizes every usher is a retired jockey who worked as a waiter or bartender for Dot. Back in the days of Dorthea’s, they’d begun their tradition of wearing socks the color of their former silks. The spaces between dark pant cuffs and polished shoes reveal slivers of fuchsia, lime, electric blue, canary yellow.
The minister obviously did not know Dot, but then no minister would, considering her nondenominational status. Brunch was her church, and when asked where she attended, she would always reply, “Ascension of the Bloody Mary.”
During the minister’s mercifully brief portion of the service, he drones hollow praise and recites a few rote passages from the Bible, a book Dot didn’t think much of—her review being that it was rather an outdated thriller and about as factual. His words are bereft of personal flair. Dull as rice, Gran would say.