by Sarah Perry
A woman who seems jealous of Mom’s beauty and youth says that Dale threw her right out after she cheated on him and sauntered back the next morning, unrepentant.
Another, kinder woman says that Mom just made a stupid mistake, and Dale knew that, but he couldn’t forgive her, no matter how hard he tried.
Another says that she was just bored with Dale, wanted him to “get off his ass and get a real job,” and for some reason, this explanation hurts me the most.
Her Christian friends don’t mention the cheating at all, but focus on the drugs. Mom demanded that Dale stop growing and selling, and he refused, so she turned her back on him to take her child out of that environment.
Most all of this is true.
* * *
One evening during the months of Mom and Dale’s fighting, I stood alone in front of the wide window facing Otter Pond, looking down through the trees. Blue evening light was gathering over the water, and all was quiet. After a moment the silence was broken by a shrill scream threading up through the woods. That first lone call was joined by another, and another, until the air rang with an uneven, warbly chorus. Hysteria bounced among the voices, passed around in a cacophony of urgent cries. Each call vibrated in my limbs, echoed in my thumping blood. In my mind, I saw children down there, playing some game gone terribly wrong, plowing through the shallow water and running for the shore in fear. But there was a frenzied power to the sound that told me it couldn’t be children, that the voices weren’t just reacting but broadcasting. Long before I learned that it was the mating calls of loons that rang out all over the pond, those sounds reinforced something I already knew: that love can sound like insanity and rage.
14
* * *
after
“By the time you’re old,” Mom would sometimes say, “they’ll have figured out how to make people live forever.” Still, she admitted that she didn’t think scientists would figure it out in time for her. So she was sure of her own death, but not mine. A fact I had tried not to contemplate. A world without her seemed impossible, immortality rendered unbearable.
So when my aunts asked me what Mom would have wanted done with her body, I knew, from these roundabout conversations about death. She had never wanted me to linger on the idea of her dying, but she had wanted me to understand that someday, many years later, I would have to go on without her. I told my aunts, firmly, that she wanted to be cremated, not buried. I’d heard her mention it a few times.
Carol went to the funeral home to make the arrangements, and Gwen and Glenice took me to the Flower Pot, on Main Street, to pick out flowers for the service. When we got there, we found several news crews in front of the shop—women with sleek, polished, mid-length hair gripping microphones, men with huge cameras perched on their shoulders, one foot planted in front of the other as though ready to pounce.
“Just ignore them,” Gwen said, but her voice shook.
“Stay inside until I come open your door,” Glenice said, anger edging her words. I did as I was told, and when I stepped out, I pulled my long curtain of hair to one side and hid behind it. The cameras were trained on us, but they didn’t approach. They had probably come intending only to get reactions from people on the street, but at the time I felt hunted. They knew who we were.
The Flower Pot was a tiny, cool space, with baskets of green plants on the floor and flowers lit up within tall glass coolers. Little light reached in from outside, and no more than ten people could have stood in there. It had always seemed like an enchanted spot, and I had visited only on happy occasions—Mom and I buying flowers for Grammy’s birthday, Dale bringing me in with him so he could get a rose or two for Mom. Now the woman behind the counter looked at me sympathetically—she, too, knew who I was. I was beginning to understand that everyone in town knew who I was, would always know.
Again I was asked what Mom would have wanted, and again I was relieved to have the answer. She loved peach roses, although only gerbera daisies—not exactly funeral appropriate—were available in peach on such short notice. The adults indulged me and ordered them. In a way, it seemed fitting that the funeral of such a young person would be full of innocent, springtime flowers, and their pale petals would complement her hair. I felt so grown up, speaking on her behalf, carrying out her wishes. I wanted to make her proud by doing everything right, as though she had left me in charge until she returned.
Afterwards, Gwen and Glenice and I went to Grammy’s house, where Carol was waiting with a brochure of tombstones. I had less influence here—they selected a pink granite stone shaped like a heart, which I considered too sentimental and pretty. The pink heart was meant for a calmer death, someone who had wasted away with a chronic disease or died of old age, someone who had time to say goodbye. Someone who died in a bed, in their clothes, surrounded by love and eased away with the support of machines. I didn’t want everything dressed up and made pretty. If I’d had my choice, the stone would have been hard and dark like the death: an angular chunk of polished black marble, or a tall, sharp obelisk piercing the sky. I hated the idea of an unassuming pink thing sitting in a line with all the other stones—well behaved, decorative. Undistinguished.
And then there was talk of caskets, which confused me. It turned out that cremation did not preclude a viewing. I wanted to protest. Hadn’t Mom wanted to be cremated so no one could stare at her dead body? But maybe it had just been about not lying in a box in the ground—she had such intense claustrophobia, I think she could have projected it forward even into death. I felt like Dennis would know the answer, but of course I couldn’t ask him. Nor could I ask Tim or Dale or my father. I could not risk speaking to any suspects for any reason.
I didn’t know exactly why Mom had wanted to be cremated, so I kept my mouth shut. I remember those around me talking about “saying goodbye,” which seemed to me just more gentle sentimentality. I had no interest in seeing her. I wanted to tell these people that seeing her dead wouldn’t help. I wanted to tell them how unlikely it was that any mortician could get her into viewing shape. But I held back. I didn’t want to horrify them. I was learning that there were silences now, unbridgeable spaces between myself and those around me.
Now, I step carefully into the subject of Mom’s funeral, asking Glenice just who made the decision to put Mom’s body on view. “That’s what you wanted,” she says. “You wanted to say goodbye. I didn’t want to see her that way—it was terrible. I’ve never gotten over it.” When I protest, sure that I’d wanted Mom cleanly burned rather than revealed, she says, “Well, maybe Wendall decided. I don’t really know.” This sort of tragic miscommunication would happen again and again over the years, warping our love in ways we couldn’t even see.
A few days after that initial cautious foray, I call Glenice again. I press further and discover that she and others viewed Mom’s body at the funeral home, before the morticians did their work. I am stunned by this, cannot bear to ask any more about it, still have no idea what purpose this viewing was meant to serve. I think about my conviction in those days that I knew more than they did about everything, that they had been protected from what I had seen. I feel foolish, ungenerous, hard. But then Glenice says, “I didn’t want you to see her like that,” and I feel the old anger: I already had seen her like that. Why is this so easy for them to forget? Their wishful amnesia may come from a place of love, but it makes me feel terribly alone.
* * *
The funeral was held four days after the murder, exactly one week after Mother’s Day. To say it was sunny is an understatement. The spring day that came to receive such sadness and anger from so many people was flawless. It was bright but not hot. The sky was blue—placidly, perfectly blue, the sort of blue that seems to vibrate and pull you up with its boundless energy. It was an expensive blue, like a chip from an ancient vase, like a jewel full of deep light. I kept looking up at it, to check that it was really there. It was impossible that the beauty of that sky had survived that night.
Gwen and Gl
enice had not yet made that trip to the house, as it was still an active crime scene. So Gwen lent me a dress—bright and flowing, with large purple flowers and a lace collar. At first I fretted that it wasn’t black, but Gwen assured me that wearing black to a funeral was just an old-fashioned custom, not really a strict rule anymore. That I looked pretty.
That morning, I stood in front of Grammy’s house, surrounded by the handful of family who had gathered there, and peered at my grandmother as she held a flat little camera like Mom’s, feet planted, bent forward at the waist, diligently recording the moment. I wore an uncertain smile, confused about why we were taking a photograph at all. Everyone turned out blurry.
We arrived at the funeral home early, and I went to sit on a bench on the lawn. My friend Vicki soon came and sat with me. I remember talking very fast while watching wind blow through green leaves. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m just not really feeling anything at the moment.” She did me the kindness of just sitting quietly, nodding occasionally to show she was listening. I felt scary and strange, but she just watched the leaves with me, until Gwen came and walked me inside.
There was time in the beginning for each of us to view the body privately. Gwen and I would go in first, even though I didn’t really want to see Mom. Her body had been made into evidence, then was cleaned up and sewn back together, and now we were supposed to say goodbye to her through it—the ritual was absurd, but there was no escaping. I knew I would have to see her during the funeral, knew we’d be front row and center, and I wanted to prepare myself. I did not want to wail in front of a roomful of people.
Gwen and I entered the room, and as I looked down the long row of folding wooden chairs I thought, There she is. For the second time, I walked slowly toward her. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was playing—the adagio sostenuto—each high note like a needle sent to pierce my calm, the low notes drawn out and relentless, dragging me inexorably along like my own stubborn heartbeats. The song would haunt me forever, would stop me cold when I heard it in movies or on elevators, or while trapped on hold with customer service. This song, and the beeping of a phone off the hook, will forever hit me from my blind spot.
Mom didn’t look a whole lot like herself, and that made the looking a little easier; it was her and not her. But there was a sadness to her disguise: They had put so much makeup on her face that you could hardly see her freckles. And worse than that, her hair had become thin and threadlike, a cloud of pinkish cotton wool instead of her thick golden-red waves. The anchor of her beauty had been ruined, and her face was a stranger’s.
Gwen and I stood beside each other, silent. We made ourselves look, and then we turned around and walked slowly back out to the hall. If we spoke, the words are lost. In my memory we are blank to each other; we are, of all things, embarrassed. There was no way to know what to say or do. We weren’t there to say goodbye; she was already gone.
Townspeople and friends and distant relatives soon began to arrive, shuffling slowly through an outer room where we sat to receive them. Mom’s death was something that had happened to many people, but I remember being furious that there were people there whom I didn’t know, who I suspected didn’t really know her, who had come to see the murdered woman. I wanted to protect her. I wanted her all to myself.
My father, Tom, and Dale and Dennis and Tim were all conspicuously missing from the funeral. At the time, I thought that as suspects they’d been banned from attending. So I was glad that none of them came. And anyway, it was easier to cast them all out of my heart, all at once, if I never saw any of them again.
Sitting next to my aunts in the receiving line, I shook hands and thanked people, whether I felt like it or not, and, gradually, the buzzing energy I’d felt out on the lawn with Vicki returned. People handed me cards, and I read some of them as they arrived, got distracted and set others aside for later. It was my classmate Jessica, a girl I wasn’t even that close to, who had the misfortune of dissolving me. She walked up to me, not looking uncomfortable like most of the other kids who came, but just terribly sad, and handed me a pale pink card—a simple thing with a picture of fall leaves on the front next to a quotation from Thoreau: “Every blade in the field—every leaf in the forest—lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.” I read it and then my hand dropped to my side and my spine slumped and I started crying, weeping as I felt the weight of everything coming down. It hadn’t even been possible to make her look nice for the coffin she probably had never wanted. Those lovely words were empty; Mom had been robbed of her right to die beautifully.
And how very beautiful my mother had been, less than one hundred hours before.
* * *
The service itself was a brief blur of sonorous platitudes, the whisper of clothing shifting in seats, the occasional loud sniffle from the back row. There was one long pause during which the pastor, a woman, stopped and gave me an opportunity to get up and read a poem. I was known as a writer and had written a poem just a few weeks earlier for my friend Adrienne, whose mother had been killed in a car accident. But for my own mother, for this, I had no words. The pastor gestured to me with a small smile, but I shook my head. I had nothing.
I sat in front with my aunts, head bowed. I wept quietly but obviously, my shoulders shaking and heaving from the beginning of the ceremony to the end, and I didn’t look at that strange, inert version of her once, although a voice in my head kept telling me that I should. And I felt ashamed of both of these failures.
15
* * *
before
During the months of fighting at Dale’s, Mom and I moved out of his house and into my grandmother Grace’s over and over, spending a week or so at her house until Mom and Dale made up, a week or two back at his house until they broke up again. One night Mom packed a few of our belongings and we got in the car once more, headed across town to Grammy’s—the same house where Mom had spent most of her childhood. I had pajamas and some clothes in my pink plastic suitcase, and brought three of my favorite stuffed animals along. I hated being apart from the rest of them, and had started to cry when I saw them looking at me from my bed, even as I tried to tell myself that I should be tough, that their glass eyes were empty. I could barely look at our dog, our two cats. I was ten years old, had not yet learned to brace for disappointment. A week earlier we had moved back into Dale’s house, and like all the other times, I had thought we were back for good.
As we entered town and the yellow streetlights spilled over my lap, one after another, I glared out the passenger window. I was furious at my mother for calmly steering us back toward Grammy’s house, where it was becoming clearer each time that we were a burden. Finally I burst out, “I don’t want to go to Grammy’s! Why do we have to do this? Why can’t we ever just stay at home?”
Just then, we pulled up to the stoplight at the center of town. It was red. Mom threw the car into park, leaned over, and clamped a hand onto my kneecap. “You should be glad we have somewhere to go!” she said, her voice filling the car. “Do you want to be homeless? Do you want to live on the street?” Her eyes were big, and her voice shook with anger. I was shocked: she rarely ever yelled at me, and she never touched me when she was angry. Was Grammy’s really our only option? For a moment I saw us wandering around town like the one homeless person I knew of, a man named Ski, who was always thin and dirty, a shambling drug addict who seemed to take pleasure in scaring kids. I imagined Mom’s white Keds dingy and gray, my ankles sticking out of pants I’d outgrown, both of us shivering under tattered wool blankets. The scene was Dickensian, melodramatic, and terrifying. We couldn’t bring our cats to Grammy’s house, because she didn’t like them, but we certainly couldn’t have cats if we didn’t have a place to live at all. I drifted back into the present. I mumbled, “No. I’m sorry,” as tears slid out of my eyes again. Mom’s grip on my knee relaxed, and her whole body seemed to slump back into her seat. The light turned green. She put the car into drive. And I got a glimpse of ho
w hard everything was for her.
* * *
When I was younger, I had spent cozy nights at Grammy’s while Mom and Dale went out, once or twice a month. Back then, she was a sweet, smushy grandma whose eccentric habits were endearing. Chief among these was her insistence on proper, antiquated names for things; jeans were “dungarees,” her well was always her “artesian well,” and her monochrome bedroom wasn’t purple—it was “orchid.” That bedroom perfectly reflected her obsessive personality: the walls, the bedspread, the sheets, the rugs, the picture frames, the silk flowers—absolutely everything was orchid.
But as I’d grown older, in the year or so before we moved into her house, I’d begun to feel a little differently about Grammy. She was still nice to me, but I’d started to realize that she wasn’t always so nice to Mom. Grammy had never learned to drive, so we took her shopping almost every single Friday, picking her up and driving over the state line to the mall and the grocery store in New Hampshire, about thirty minutes away, to avoid paying sales tax. We often went over to Grammy’s house so Mom could check on various things, and we never missed a holiday, but still Grammy never seemed to thank Mom or do anything much for her in return. Instead she scrutinized her every decision, and constantly accused her of not doing enough to help. Her other nine children, with the exception of Gwen, visited much less often, but she didn’t seem to judge them for it.
When we moved into Grammy’s, her critical eye focused even more sharply on Mom. She always made sure her daughter knew what a favor she was doing her by taking her in. It was impossible to relax in her house, a tiny landscape of perfect order and personal rituals that we could neither anticipate nor master. Ray had died a few years before, and Grammy now had total control. Clean brown towels had to be tucked around the couch cushions to protect the upholstery that visitors never got to see or sit on directly. Washcloths had to be folded just so. Mom and I lived in a spare room with a twin bed that had a trundle bed underneath, and even though Grammy didn’t have any reason to enter the room during the day, the trundle bed had to be tucked away each morning, a tedious operation that made me feel like we were hiding all evidence of our stay.