Final Vinyl Days

by Jill McCorkle

  But you have everything for real. You have Mr. Big legally.

  You are hopeless, woman. I’m the one that ought to be crying! Snap to. Listen to some good advice, because in a minute I’ll be out of here. You tell him that you know all about that little bitch he’s been seeing (she works at Blockbuster Video and wears way too much eye makeup). Tell him he better shape his butt up or you are out of here, sister. Make him sweat. I mean I don’t want a thing to do with him, you know? So use me. Call me by name. Tell him I’ll come to your divorce hearing and help you clean up. Get him back if you want him, and make him behave. But don’t let him off easy. Pitch a blue blazing fit. Scream, curse, throw things. Let him have it, honey. Your husband is cheating on us. Let him have it. And when all is said and done, please just forget that I was ever here; that I ever walked the earth. After all, I’m Big Foot. Who knows if I even exist.

  It’s a Funeral! RSVP

  I have spent my life looking for the right occupation and have finally found it: I throw funerals. My husband, James, now has a good answer for all those people who ask what his wife does. Well, she used to throw pots, and now she throws funerals. That’s true. Every phase of our marriage is neatly catalogued by my quest. Early on, I hand painted china figurines to mark life’s special occasions (those were the pregnant years, and it felt good to sit on a pillow with my legs splayed and a fan blowing full in my face while I moved a teeny-tiny ox-bristle brush). When my children (a set of twin boys with a baby sister right on their heels) threatened my whole career every time they ran through the dining room, where I kept the several hundred figurines, they prompted me to design and build sandboxes and little frog ponds. That led me to a full-blown landscaping business, which, from time to time, included a sideline—a tree house–building service. All of that ended one hot summer of black thumbnails and complaining children (they had the Swiss Family Robinson tree house in mind and found my prefab four-by-six with loft to be seriously lacking). I realized I liked tending my own garden but had no real interest in anybody else’s. Then I started catering, given that I was always in the kitchen anyway.

  “So what now?” James asked at dinner the night of the baby’s first day of kindergarten. I was left at home all by myself for the first time in eons. It was so quiet the first year I got two little Yorkies to keep me company. They yapped in stereo all day long; sometimes their yapping took the shape and rhythm of old hymns and I’d swing around believing they had just done two stanzas of “Softly and Tenderly.” Now, when I look back, I think I was getting a signal, a sign. I did not tell James this, of course; he is a brain surgeon (yes, and don’t laugh even if it is funny, and don’t ask if I was a patient, as many do); we do not see eye to eye on the theory of thought process.

  For me, the brain is a great big filing cabinet with memories packed into every crease and crevice. And every single memory is a key that unlocks the heart, a door that swings forward and lets in a rush of passion. Without the heart that brain is worth nothing, I like to say, and James nods, though I know from the look in his eyes that he is somewhere else, not really at our Queen Anne mahogany dining table that my son painted a yellow line (in oil paint) down the middle of to play race car the first day I got it. What is true, of course, is that James’s profession has always paid for mine, until, of course, this last one, which is bigger than anybody ever dreamed it would be. I call it my “career of a life and a death time.”

  I speak of salvation and James speaks of sutures. He says a lot of men have asked him over the years how he can be married to a woman who runs around doing whatever she damn well pleases at all hours of the day. I knew which man said this. The same one who keeps his wife in little outfits from Neiman Marcus so she thinks she’s getting a good deal while he bosses her butt around all day long. He once asked me at a dinner party what made me think I could do everything. This was right after he had just worn my ear to a nub talking about the tree house he built his sons, the oil painting he sold while still a mere college student, the poetry that he’s sure would be printed in the New Yorker if he could just find time to send it out. It was clear as a bell to me that I was engaged in an arm-wrestling event I had not signed up for. I answered that I was proud for him. And I mentioned that I give myself a pap smear every now and again, and that I am frequently called in to estimate dilation of the cervix. He made a face at me, and I was then struck by all the garbage in this life. Here was a man not even forty who assumed he could do whatever anybody else was doing, but God forbid they attempt to do his business.

  “I guess she’ll be operating soon,” he said to James in passing, and James in his normal completely checked-out way said, “Probably so.” I found a way to get back over near where he was before leaving to say that I had also performed numerous rectal exams, that I had just that minute done one and found him to be the biggest one I’d ever encountered.

  I know I’m rambling, but it’s important that I lead you to the moment of realization and the reason I do what I do. Like a personal testimony, you know? I was about to turn forty and already many of my very favorite people were dead. I had children, and I wanted them to grow up with a clear vision of hope. A sense of nature and art and all that has walked this earth before them. But what I was getting was life in the nineties—can you do this? can you do that? can you do this? can you do that? Help me! Help me! comes the plea, but when you get there, the person who needed you so desperately can’t decide what shoes go with the purse, can’t decide how much lamb to buy. I was sliding to that point where my bones were feeling picked, every bit of flesh stripped away, just as I imagined was happening to my dear ones tucked in beneath the earth. There are people out there who will use you, eat you alive if you let them. They might as well say, “Hey, I’m going to a party, want to get wasted, want to borrow your brains, heart, liver, and lungs just for the occasion!”

  I was feeling close to a breakdown. If I’d had time, I might have had one. I’ve seen that done. I had a greataunt who had three hysterectomies over the course of her later life. The Everready Hysterectomy. It’s like the college student with the grandfather who just keeps dying and dying and dying. I told James I might want to have a hysterical pregnancy followed by a complete fake hysterectomy, or, I told him, I could go someplace like Canyon Ranch Spa and take a nice long mud bath. I think I could manage that. I see myself propped up in a satin bedjacket (mineral water/carrot sticks/velvet drapes/classical music at tubside), or hell, let’s get real. Send me to the Holiday Inn; Lanz flannel shrunk up to my shins, Diet Coke and sea-salt-and-vinegar chips. I’d eat until my mouth was parched and dry and then chase them down with cola. I’m a Taurus, and we do things like that—chug, eat huge desserts, hug and kiss perfect strangers who look like they need some attention, seize ourselves by the horns.

  I know people who sigh in tiredness at the end of a day of doing nothing. She might have one child that comes with a built-in babysitter, and she sighs, “Oh dear, I’m afraid I really have to leave the house for the cleaning service.” Excuse me, like did I miss some big chunk of evolution? At the same party where Mr. OB talked so much I overheard someone ask, “Who’s your girl?” I thought for a nanosecond that I was eavesdropping on a lesbian revolution out in suburbia, but no, it was the female version of who has the biggest penis. For women, it’s who is the busiest in this culture-filled world. Does your child speak one language or three? When did he give up reading Time for the New Republic? An op-ed in crayon? Really? Do you do suzuki? Do you do soccer? Do you do liquor at the end of the day? (That was my line.)

  I was there. I heard that. Whatever happened to children stretched out in the sunshine with their bookbags tossed off to the side. I loved that kind of day—the sun so hot it made a red, wriggly movie right there on your own eyelids; it made those file drawers fly open, the crevices in my brain responding to that slow Southern sun and melting with memory. Sometimes it felt so good, it made me have to pee, and sometimes if I was completely overwhelmed, I’d slip into the edge o
f the woods and pull down my underwear and lean there against a pine tree, my saddle shoes pretending to be the banks of the river—Yellow River by I. P. Freely, Miniskirts by Seymore Hiney. When you let your brain run, there are wonderful things to find. That’s what I tell my children. Our old labrador, Trixie, a creature I brought into our marriage—one of the few creatures who cannot under any circumstances be taught to be aggressive—piddle-peed her whole puppyhood. She couldn’t help it; it felt so good when she was happy. Even now when I take her out, right at six thirty, and she splays those lovely legs to pee, there is a look of complete relief and pleasure in her eyes. She knows what to be thankful for, and it is simple.

  Children and dogs—we could all take a lesson. And that’s what I was thinking, on those days right before my business started. Look, listen. See what the world can teach you. I filled myself up on the writing of Mr. Carl (“Young”) Jung, which my whole life I had heard in my head as Joung. I even once made up a skipping-rope rhyme for my daughter where I said, “Carl Joung eats junket on the jungle gym.” I figure he would forgive me this error. I got all into thinking of patterns and synchronicity and how at some great supreme level it all will come together. Just follow the life and learn all that you can.

  I kept thinking of my good friend Marjorie, an older woman who lived across the street. The children called her “the cake lady,” because she appeared at every school or church function bearing a gift of a cake in some shape or another. I knew she was failing when she appeared at the synagogue with a cake in the shape of a cross, purple icing draping the sides and a spray of frosted lilies in the center. I was there that day, as I have made it my business to visit a lot of different places. I asked, “But what difference does it make?” when I saw Marjorie there by the door with a look of complete bewilderment on her face. Apparently it did make a difference to some, not all, but enough that I drove Marjorie over to the Episcopal church, where it seemed she had earlier delivered a lovely Star of David, with strict instructions that the little silver balls were just for decor and not edible. That cake was still wrapped up and off in the tiny pine-scented kitchen. They loved the cross; they ate it up, and we ate the Star of David ourselves back at our house with Marjorie and her husband.

  There are times when I have a wave of knowing, of seeing what is happening, and this was one of those times. Marjorie was sweaty with embarrassment but laughing about her mishap and James’s joke about “you are what you eat.” He asked what she would do for the Buddhists. The Muslims. She said then that she needed to bake herself a cake, but did not know how to shape senility. How do you shape forgetting? “You’re the brain man,” she said, and I knew from the way James was looking at her and the subtle questions he asked, parceling them carefully, no more than one question per course, that there would be some very bad news. As we sat with coffee and the Star of David cake, I heard him suggest that she have a few tests just to rule out anything. Her husband went pale with knowledge, and Trixie sat by her side as if frozen. Even the Yorkies knew not to yap, though they certainly knew that in minutes all three would get to lick up the last of the star.

  Babies and dogs see things we don’t. They respond to spirits and waves of emotion that we don’t sense. James, of course, says it’s just that their thoughts are not complex and therefore they appear to be fixated and entertained by things that aren’t there. This is where our paths diverge, where he tends to the mechanics, greases those file cabinet drawers, removes the little tiny piece that got itself wedged in and prevented the drawers from opening. That’s what he did to Marjorie, and then I stepped in to watch and help her pull all that she could from her files. I wanted to help her make sense of her life and if possible sense of the world. And Marjorie did make sense. The last conscious day of her life, I went over with some lunch, and she was there, sitting up in bed in a fine, yellow silk bedjacket that she’d bought for herself at Dillard’s in Raleigh before going over to Durham for her first chemo. She told me she was writing out her service and would like very much for me to listen to it all and critique what she had done. She wanted the Beatitudes—blessed are those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. … And she wanted Psalm 30 about the joy that cometh in the morning. She wanted “We Gather Together” sung, because she loved Thanksgiving and all that it represented, even though she was grossly disappointed the one time she made it all the way up north to see Plymouth Rock, only to find it cracked and covered in graffiti. She believed in keeping the past pure, and she loved the last line: He forgets not his own. She said she’d come to believe that remembering was the greatest joy in life and without that power fully intact, it was easier to leave. “My plug has been pulled,” she said and laughed. And then she told me how she had known it was bad even before she was told. She had felt it deep inside.

  “I just got up one morning, went to the market and started cooking turkeys and hams—I baked pecan pies and pineapple upside-down cakes. Holidays.” She sighed and leaned back on her pillow, turned away from me to her wedding picture on the wall, two young figures in black and white. Talking food was what we often did but I realized this was not about the food at all. “I’ve got his holidays done for the next several years. I labeled them, made enough for him to have our children and their children join him.” She turned back to me then, her lip quivering as her hands fluttered in the air as if she were chasing little dust motes. “In every little container of giblet gravy, there is frozen a vial. I got these vials every time I ever bought saffron—like gold that spice, and I love it, tiny threads the color of the sun and the smell! Heaven. I saved the little bottles, and now there are messages there. I tell a joke. I give them my love. I tell them to hug and kiss one another and pretend that it is me.” When I left she was sleeping there beside her weeping husband, his hands clutching hers to keep her from flying away.

  The truth is that I have never admired anything quite so much in my entire life. At the time, my catering had taken a little slump. Instead of getting the good gigs like so-and-so’s coming out as a debutante at the country club or so-and-so’s getting married, I was basically doing meals-on-wheels for the elderly and shut-ins. Suits me. I have a husband and children waiting for me at the end of the day, and it’s convenient to deal with people who go to bed when the sun goes down. Anyway, not long after Marjorie died and I went to perhaps the loveliest funeral I’d ever attended, I was struck by how funerals need more participation, and more care taken to represent the deceased.

  I knew from delivering special meals to the nursing home that they’re all in there talking about what they do and do not want. This one wants to be facing east so she’ll see the rising sun on Judgment Day, and this other one wants to be cremated and kept in a jar at her daughter’s house (whether her daughter wants that or not). This one wants “Softly and Tenderly,” and that one wants “Lead on, O King Eternal.” This one wants socks on her feet (poor circulation/cold extremeties), and that one wants to wear as little as possible. She’s a huge woman with damp, drooping skin who says she has sweated to death here on earth and would relish the thought of being naked under some cool dirt. Pin them down and you’ll find they have ideas. Pin them down good and hard, and you’ll likely discover that at some point in their lives they have let their minds wander into these very specific scenes, involving death, funeral, those left behind to grieve.

  Marjorie and I had sat there in her bedroom on a normal Thursday afternoon while the rest of the world was working or shopping or carpooling, and read all of her Scriptures, sung all of her songs. At the end, she said with great joy, “I feel like I was there.” She said it reminded her of being a child in her grandmother’s country church, where the air smelled like the rusty pump water and the stables down the road. “It was so quiet out there,” she whispered, “you could hear silence for minutes at a time, the kind of silence that makes your ears buzz and ring in the distance. It might be your own blood you’re hearing. It might even be a swarm of cancer cells building a hive, but
what I’ve always believed is what my grandmother said: a ringing in the ears is the singing of spirits.” She said her half-deaf uncle said if that was so, he was the most blessed creature on earth, his dang ears had been ringing since he got too close to where some men were busting up a dam with dynamite.

  “I can’t believe I remembered that just now,” Marjorie said, and that’s when it hit me. A funeral business. People can come and have it all planned out, maybe make a video and have it put aside for later, like the will. Those who have been given a pink slip due either to diagnosis or old age, can just go right ahead and have the service, be there. I tried the idea out on James who, patient though he has always been, looked at me like I might have lost my mind. But there are lots of folks who are that way, those who find death too depressing.

  They like the idea that it might all go away. There are those who are scared to death of death and can’t bear to talk about it. Well, obviously I am not one. The day after Marjorie’s funeral, I dreamed I was dying. I had less than six months to live. In my dream I was mainly sad over the fact that I would not be there to oversee my daughter’s and sons’ graduations from high school and college, their weddings, the grandbabies. I was worried that their father might not indulge them in the fashion of the day, which is so important when you’re young, that he might not surround them with animals who might sense and alert them to things in the air. The thought of missing all of that was bad, but aside from that sadness, there was a feeling of great satisfaction. In my dream I was looking at James and the kids who were all gathered around our striped dining table to observe the electricity James could get out of a wired potato (it was a memory picture—they were much younger in the dream than in reality), and what I was feeling was peace. I thought: I have accomplished more than I ever thought I would. I have lived a good life. When I woke up I wiggled up close to James, and even though I was still crying, I had never felt more alive in my whole life. It was like the way people come out of a revival after being saved, only I knew that this was the real thing, and it has not worn off, either.