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Johanna Ruth Hendrix, 46, died Monday at Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center.
A native of Santa Cruz, Calif., she was born July 31, 1943, and had been a Reno resident for the past 11 years.
Mrs. Hendrix worked in the food service industry.
Surviving are her daughter, R.D. Hendrix, age 15; son, son, son, and son Hendrix, ages 24 to 30; father, John Gunthum, whereabouts unknown; mother, Shirley Crumb; and leagues of empty barstools and even emptier beer glasses.
Cremation will be at the Masonic Memorial Gardens Crematory, under direction of the Alan Sparks Memorial Cremation Society.
A memorial is being established with the Sun Valley Lions Club, P.O. Box 20068, Sun Valley 89431. A service is scheduled for 11 a.m. Saturday at the Truck Stop.
Bring casserole.
and this too shall pass
My brothers sit on lawn chairs and I park myself on the gravel in front of them, hide myself in the stubble of their five o’clock shadows and feel like the newest fifth wheel on the Calle, a whisper of my own capital H. We went to Hobee’s for breakfast, but they should have saved their money because we didn’t make a dent in the buffet. And now we’re sitting together in front of the Nobility trying to figure out what to do next. The gravel pokes my ass as I watch my four brothers, grown men already getting ready to say good-bye to their twenties, consider how to help me get my feet on the ground, a little sister they hardly know. Each has a wife, common law or otherwise, and already too many mouths to feed to offer to take me. I wouldn’t go with them anyway and maybe they know that, remember it from having made a choice like this themselves once and at a similar age, and that is why we talk around it. No one suggests my living with Grandma either. We all know that her Social Security check provides just enough to keep her poor without taking me on, even including what the Social Security office might see fit to provide by way of what they do not hesitate to call Surviving Child Benefits. I could go to Grandma’s and be her final burden. She wouldn’t complain but she knows, and we know, the time has come for me to get on with growing up. I don’t need my brothers and Grandma doesn’t need me. It’s the Calle or the highway, and so the first adult understanding between us begins with this: I’ll take care of myself. All that remains is to figure out how to guarantee a minimum of interference on the part of the County. And how to say good-bye to Mama.
The first part is easy; we’ve been working around the County our whole lives. It won’t even take having the County look the other way, if we don’t ask them for anything, looking the other way is what they’ll do, and as soon as I’m sixteen, I’ll emancipate myself, which is County talk for become an adult on paper.
The second part is something new and takes a lot of cigarettes, smoked to the quick, to even begin to figure out. I watch them smoke and talk it out, talk her out, our late, great mama, figure out what our two versions of her have in common and what they don’t.
“I never really got in trouble for anything,” I say, and Gene says he did once, really caught it, “For smoking pot outside the house,” and Bob says, “For cussing around strangers.” The pot was before my time, when Mama was still kid enough to rock her shelves with Kerouac without needing to know just why she should. When she was still kid enough to send her own kids off to school with hair so long they got beat for it. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix. The 4-H Club. My brothers grew up with too much beat and not enough rhythm in a house, an actual house, full of Buddhas and Nag Champa, prayer flags and peace signs. But our house, Mama’s and mine, has wheels and is kept so clean it’s always ready to roll, and except for the fading mint of Benson & Hedges the air is clear, and except for a beaded sign that decorates the top of our corkboard, the colors of its purple, gold, and black beads blending with the darkening shades of the electric bills pinned below, the sign that says AND THIS TOO SHALL PASS AWAY, nothing of that old house, nothing of that old Mama remains. The sign is right; when Mama came to Reno she left that life behind. If it weren’t for these few relics that make the Nobility different from the other trailers in our row, it would feel almost like my brothers and I didn’t have the same mother at all except for, as the 4-H Club and I are discovering, her lenience, her lack of chores and penalties, and her fear. They remember her being afraid and not knowing of what, but I’m the only one who still feels her demands, her grip on my shoulders, her eyes brown and sharp as bottle glass, her voice telling me what she never told her boy children, saved instead for a girlchild.
“Smoke follows beauty,” she liked to say, and their smoke burns through Mama’s life, climbs and ducks through her ups and downs, and it’s a pattern I recognize, so it must be our same mama after all, theirs and mine, share and share alike, but just when I think we’ve got her agreed on, the smoke turns quick, gathers, darkens, and folds itself into the shape of a man. Winston is making a list of who we need to call, and Grandma is calling Mama’s sisters from her trailer in California, and I say, “What about Grandpa Gun?” but once the name is said it blows back against the 4-H Club like thunder clapping, close enough to make me shiver, and numbers begin to rise automatically in my head. It’s Mama’s voice teaching, telling me to “count the number of seconds between the thunder and the lightning, that’s how close the danger is, girlchild.”
Thunderclaps, and I stop counting, and say a sound that is equal to the number of seconds since the light flashed jagged, since Grandpa appeared here in front of the Nobility double-wide where he’s never been allowed. The number is supposed to be equal to the number of miles away we are from the approaching storm, but I can tell from my brothers’ faces that we’re already in it and before I can stop myself, the next sounds I make slant up at the end, curl themselves into questions, and the smoke that has taken Grandpa’s shape swallows my questions back down into my still-open mouth, and settles itself across my lungs like the dark bands of asphalt that bind the Calle, and my brothers begin their talk about Gun, the myths and hazy truths, and the two versions of him there are too.
Ronnie says that Grandpa thought dress-up time was shoot-out time, but Gene throws in, for no reason at all that I can see, “Mama never was deaf in one ear, just pretending. He never touched us.” It’s all mixed-up, top and bottom, these stories of Grandpa and his daughters, what he did and didn’t do: pale skin during a moment of touch, four little girls surviving a shotgun shack, so like Mama’s little boys surviving the cabin on the ridge the night she tried to take them all down. I wonder how many of her words, screamed at air, were for him. How many of her warnings about pretty dresses and bathing suit string were said too strong to me because they were too late for her. And then it’s enough. Enough to start a sweat creeping across my back, to unspool the memory of seeing Grandpa once in real life, flesh and blood not smoke and mirrors, his pickup truck to pick me up after school. He said Grandma was “off somewheres,” that Mama needed him to get me. And he said I should call him Grandpa, his fingers on the steering wheel red from cold, calluses rising sharp and clear, the Braille of the working class. I could read his age from his hands, I could guess his trade, but his sins went silent as fingerprints and the lights on the Calle start to flicker and the insects begin their crawl, under the skin, trying to find a way out, they trail up my arms, push the hairs to stand at attention.
Grandpa Gunthum says he’s taking me to Kmart to buy me any doll I want, “No matter what anybody has to say about it,” and then, “up to ten dollars.” I’m standing in the toy aisle facing one way and the other, feeling stared at by this strange Grandpa and by the dolls, lined up for the taking. I’m wondering what it might have took for Grandma to send him to pick me up from school in her place, and feeling pressure in my thighs from not knowing how to pick a new doll or if I should pick one at all, and I twist my foot around my ankle and begin examining the patch on my pocket. Grandpa wants to know why I’m taking so long, and I say that if I could hold the money myself it would help me decide, so he hands the bills over, and then I pick
a doll quick and pay the checkout lady myself, trying to make sure Grandpa doesn’t think just because he bought me a doll it makes me his Holly Hobbie.
There were lots of things Mama never learned how to do and too many things she shouldn’t have had to learn, her future spun early like a knife-thrower’s wheel, the making and unmaking of a rotten-mouthed girl, the histories of a feebleminded daughter. Mama couldn’t see anything except what happened to her, her story spelled out over and over again. And I can’t see what happens in the shadows created by the Hardware Man, but those shadows mark that something was lost, and that’s how I know that Grandpa didn’t cast his shadow on me, because I can remember that day. But Mama couldn’t have believed it, and I finally understand why, why she couldn’t think her father might hold tighter to regret than he ever held her and would only try to push his way back into our lives for an afternoon in order to prove to himself that he could. For all my yelling against history, for all the spelling bee chances I’ve lost and the chances I might have left, when my mama’s life was decided, mine was too, at least in her eyes. She didn’t like coming home then and she won’t be coming home now, but at least I know why. All this time she thought that she hadn’t saved me the way she hadn’t been saved, but there’s more than one way to save a kid, and maybe my brothers just did it, by telling me about Grandpa Gun and the real reason Mama didn’t like coming home at night.
My brothers survived her craziest years in one piece and never got close enough to risk body or soul again. But you have to come home when someone dies, because blood is thicker than tar and all the scrubbing in the world won’t stop your good and bad blood flowing forever together through your veins, meeting in a rush at corners, gathering force, and washing you back up on the Calle. Now they’ve done their duty by seeing if they’re needed, and I’ve done my duty by telling them they’re not. We’ve made our plans, for my survival, for my new life on the Calle. We’ve got a pack of lies to deal to the County, should they ever come knocking. The good brothers are rowing back home to the lives they somehow figured out how to make once the Ridge was behind them, and I hug them good-bye and stand under the awning to watch their taillights fade.
paper dolls
It’s not like I haven’t ever cracked the hope chest’s lid before, but I only looked at the letters bundled on the top, then closed it quick again. I never moved anything around, never so much as pulled a ribbon on those stacks. Mama’s superstitions were as hereditary as anything else, and I was afraid of upsetting the balance she’d arranged with old man Death. I never stepped on cracks, either, but this is mine now and the lid sounds different when I open it, quieter, like it knows I’m not sneaking this time. It’s warped from the plant Mama kept on it, and I lean its curve against the wall and start taking out papers. And the first answer to my questions about “What’s in the hope chest?” about “What’s so important?” is: a lot. A body can sure hold on to a lot of paper in a lifetime, even a short one, and when that body’s gone, not many of those papers make sense.
Here are a few things of Mama’s: every assignment I ever brought home, even from kindergarten, bundles of letters from Grandma to her, every single card my brothers ever sent, even if all they wrote on it themselves was their name, was a first initial. Nothing is that surprising, though, until I find a set of pictures almost in full color. They’re of a swimming pool and trees. And my brothers. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix. Mama isn’t in any of them, but it’s easy to imagine her standing worried by that water, afraid for her boys. They must have visited a place with a pool, they’re splashing around in it, their briefs all the same, stripes running horizontally across. They look happy, the flash doesn’t scare them at all, and I wonder if that’s why Mama kept these pictures, particularly these. To remind herself that whatever else she didn’t do, she made sure all of her children knew how to survive in elements she would never master.
And there’s a picture of me that Mama took. I’m wearing the suit I wore to the lake that summer, a two-piece the color of wine lipstick, shimmery and dark, light purple lines curling over the tops of my not-yet breasts, swinging up in waves around the bottoms. I can tell from the look on my face that I’m impatient to get away from the camera and into the lake that rolls out behind me.
There are black-and-white photos too. Mama and her sisters wearing matching dresses like the Girl Scouts of Other Nations in the illustrated section of the Girl Scout Handbook. They stand in perfectly graduated height and I’m dizzy when I look into their eyes, eyes about the same age as mine. It’s like the photos become a pop-up book, their helplessness cut from the paper and scored, they take shape on my lap and I feel Mama’s hands squeezing, her eyes bright and begging, but I don’t know what she wants anymore or who she’s asking.
Underneath the pictures there is a thick bunch of legal-sized papers, curled up on the end from so many years in the hope chest, from all the miles it’s traveled in our immobile mobile home. There is a small note on top addressed to Johanna Ruth Hendrix c/o The Santa Cruz Legal Aid Society, and it tells her, “The County of Santa Cruz protests the release of this information,” and the information whose release is being protested is my mama’s, my family’s, my own. The reports, written by V. White and the State of California, are linear and sure, they’re positive about times and places, make no bones about guilt or truth, and they begin like this:
CHRONOLOGICAL RECORD
HENDRIX, Johanna Ruth
116 Holway Drive
Santa Cruz, California
funeral etiquette
When a Calle resident passes on, it is customary to not know what to do, say, or where to look. The very phrase “passes on” can be confusing as it implies a forward motion hitherto unfamiliar on Calle streets. This confusion is natural, and for Calle residents who aren’t directly affected by the death, meeting those in mourning for the departed soul is best avoided. However, if the waning supply of frozen meals necessitates leaving the house, for example, or one drink is in order after the day you’ve had, the following guidelines will assist in handling most encounters with a minimum of discomfort.
A primary goal during any occasion for mourning taking place on the Calle is to have one’s actions be as inoffensive as possible. The bolder acquaintances of the deceased will make a phone call or perhaps deliver a store-bought card. The less bold will attempt sympathetic shapes with smoke rings from the safety of their kitchen table and say nothing. Mass cards or other devotional objects do not come into play here except for the usual found at every kitchen table on the Calle: cut decks brought home from the casinos, the machined slit at the top alerting handlers that this deck is too worn for the tables and gamblers whose soft hands learn the nuances of a worn card faster than the shape of a woman’s curves. During such times, these cards are shuffled more thoughtfully than usual, the dealer often needing to be reminded to deal, of the game still being played by the living.
In lieu of the usual mementos, then, souvenirs in the form of paperwork are distributed directly to those suffering most. Early visitors will assist the bereaved, especially if she is underage, with application forms for social security (SSDI) and surviving child benefits (Form 410-414), with discussions of emancipation if deemed necessary, and with the kind of grief that turns one into an adult overnight (see Form 831b, use black ink only).
If you’d like to contribute something to the memorial, flowers say all you can’t and shouldn’t. Be they gladiolas, wisteria, or toilet paper, a floral arrangement is simple and meaningful, a comfort to the mourner who will miss her mother’s sure hand in the garden. Your florist or bartender can guide you in selecting something appropriate.
Attire in this circumstance should be considerately chosen. The cleanest shirt with the most buttons still attached for men and longer skirts, to the knee if possible, for women. Floral patterns should be avoided, and uniforms of any sort are frowned upon.
Once at the actual funeral, if you are unfamiliar with the customs of the fa
mily in mourning, follow the lead of others. This will usually take you to the ice chest wherein you will find ice-cold beverages. The bottle opener will be attached to a string on one of the ice chest’s handles. After you’ve had some refreshment, pay your respects to the person who has died by having a bit more. If you are worried about what to say or what not to say to those surviving, some examples of phrases better avoided are “She was a piece of ass” and “Live by the bottle, die by the bottle.”
Specific foods are prepared in mourning situations, often the same ones consumed in front of the television during car races, the interminable circles of the cars mimicking the circles of the Calle as well as the circles of life and death. After filling your plate with potato salad and beans it is appropriate to become completely smashed, putting your arms around strangers and sobbing heartbreak over the deceased. Your very presence will thus add meaning to the occasion, whether you eventually pass out or not.
The question about whether children should be present at the memorial is best answered with other common questions asked at this time, such as: Where else would they go? and, Who would watch them? Most important, however, is the question: Where else could they acquire the necessary tools for coping with adulthood’s losses without this atmosphere to provide the appropriate conditions? Funerals are usually where Calle pubescents have their first drinks, as the adults around them realize that life is indeed too short and distribute the alcohol themselves.
Many Calle teens have their first sexual experiences during funerals and memorials. There is no doubt that usually subdued teenagers find these experiences an incredibly meaningful way to express their grief. It is important, however, to advise children, teens, and those who just act like them, to be on their best behavior. For example, one should never slip behind the Porta-John brought for the day’s function and kiss her neighbor, who wears his father’s leather jacket and reeks of cologne, should never kiss him right on the mouth and find that his lips are bigger than they look, that his tongue is cold, and that, even though his dad’s jacket almost fits him now and despite all the practice he’s had in the field behind their two houses, much of which she’s witnessed, he doesn’t kiss like a man at all.
Girlchild Page 16