“I thought I was applying for a job at a creamery, not a crematorium,” Becca lied to her mother after calling to announce that she’d found work. “You know how the city’s surrounded by dairyland. I imagined I’d be seeing cows. Free milk. I thought maybe they’d make ice cream right on the premises. Instead they burn bodies. So I switched fire for ice, right? We hold memorial services, too, like a regular funeral home. But we make sure that there aren’t any incinerations scheduled when we’re holding a memorial service. The smoke, you know? It would be a turn off for the loved ones of the deceased. I’ve got a lot of responsibilities—I help schedule memorials, and I make copies of death certificates. And I keep track of the bodies sent here from hospitals and adult care facilities and funeral homes. For burning.”
When Becca’s mother, who knew nothing of her daughter’s sour last days before graduation, asked if she’d heard from “the girls,” Becca realized that her “we” had shifted from her college friends to her crematorium connections.
“Danielle’s in Ecuador. I think she had some kind of ‘born again’ thing. Her letter was full of ‘Jesus this’ and ‘Jesus that.’ Katie? Nothing—the Ukraine is a black hole, I guess. But the guys I work with, we’re like a little family: Nick, the manager—the one whose wife died and I’m replacing—and Ethan, who does the actual cremating—he puts the ashes in the urns, too. He’s divorced and old. Thirties old. It’s like these guys have adopted me or something.”
Nick’s dead wife Rita had been gone two months when Becca was hired at Memory Garden Crematory Services, but her perfume lived on. It visited Becca’s reception space nearly every day, wafting from opened drawers and file folders. Nick kept his wife’s ashes in a small, bejeweled urn on his desk. He’d rested a plump hand tenderly on the urn’s cover during Becca’s interview.
“This is my Rita. Not all of her. She was a large woman. We had to have a special casket prepared. Her body is interred down in New Jersey in her family’s plot. This urn contains the remains of her heart. Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to take her place completely. That would be too much pressure.”
After three months at the crematorium, the closest Becca came to a date was her Friday lunches with her boss at the Golden Corral.
“Rita and I ate here every Friday,” Nick repeated like a blessing over each afternoon’s first platter of ribs, shrimp, mashed potatoes and gravy. And Becca surprised herself by digging right in, the mountain of food on her own dish nearly as high as her boss’s. But she drew the line at dessert. She kept her back to the gushing chocolate fountain at the pastry and confection table and, instead of a brownie, made sure to spoon an extra dollop of steamed vegetables onto her plate. She watched Nick seem to swell as he ate, his features smoothing out as if they were painted on an expanding balloon, and she wondered if she looked the same to him, and if he liked it.
“We couldn’t have children of our own—Rita had too many health issues,” Nick shared one Friday. “But we planned to adopt. We were going to go to the Ukraine. The trip was set, and then she passed.”
Becca licked mashed potatoes from her lip. “I have a friend in the Ukraine.” The chocolate fountain thundered like a waterfall behind her. She raised her voice. “She’s in the Peace Corps. I haven’t talked to her in a while.”
Nick’s head bobbed. “They have rules in the Ukraine. Only married, straight couples can adopt. So I lose my wife, and I’m not allowed to have a kid.” A tear that might have been a sweat droplet slid down his cheek. Becca’s gaze fell to the chicken and rib bones piled on her plate.
On Saturdays and Sundays, Becca purged: a cherishable muffin top was one thing; fat was another. She abandoned exercise in favor of starvation, laxatives, and diet pills, and waggled a finger down her throat when absolutely necessary.
“I’m not bulimic,” she insisted to herself. “I’m a friend. I’m accommodating.”
Mondays through Thursdays Becca lunched on rice crackers and seltzer with Ethan in his office at the end of the long hallway separating his cremation equipment from the front office and memorial chapel. She sat on a folding chair and picked at flavorless crumbs from the napkin on her lap while he sat at his desk, washing down bites of his sandwich with gulps of coffee. Urns of all kind were stacked on shelves and on the floor. Some of the lidded ones probably contained ashes. Ethan’s calendar was posted on the wall over his desk, incineration times highlighted in yellow. Becca watched the muscles in his jaw and throat knot and relax as he chewed and swallowed. When he ran his hand through his curls, she expected the silver tipping them to flake off like ashes. After a season at Memory Garden Crematory Services, Becca only knew one detail about Ethan—he was divorced. But how she knew that, she couldn’t recall. Usually, the conversation was up to her. She told Ethan about her college life: books she’d read, professors, parties.
“It seems like a hundred years ago,” she said.
One day Becca asked Ethan if he and Nick were close. She’d learned from Nick that the two had worked together at Memory Gardens for nearly a decade.
“I hardly see you together,” she said. In fact, she wasn’t sure she ever had.
“He’s got his wife’s heart on his desk,” Ethan said, as if that answered Becca’s question.
“I know.” Before she could ask if he’d noticed the lingering smell of Rita’s perfume, Ethan swiveled his chair and faced her straight on. His eyes were black, and something flitted deep within them like bats in a cave.
“Except that it’s not her heart,” he said.
“Not her heart?”
Ethan cocked his head. “Did you know if you burn up a baby—a dead infant—in a cremator like ours, where it gets to 2100 degrees, sometimes there’s nothing left of it? It just disappears. Vaporizes.”
Becca blinked. Had he blown something into her eyes? “This happened to you?”
“I read about it. Professional knowledge. I know people it happened to.” Ethan said nothing for a ten count. “A heart is smaller than a baby.”
“Yes?”
“So—I was afraid I’d incinerate Rita’s heart into thin air and have nothing to give Nick. I burned up a book to fill her urn. Two books. I took them from a box my ex-wife still hasn’t picked up. She was an English major like you. Now she sells real estate. We got divorced for two reasons: one, she said she’d thought I was funny when she met me, but it turned out I wasn’t; the second reason was that I didn’t want to have children and she did. I told her that the last page of everybody’s story is the same—it ends here at the crematorium. Why bother with kids? If every life came with a set of directions, ‘Add fire’ would be the last one.”
“Hold it—” Becca’s head spun from the burst of revelations. “What about Rita’s heart? It’s not in the urn?”
“Romeo and Juliet. And Anna Karenina. Books ash right up. They aren’t mostly water like people are.” Ethan nodded toward the tabletop refrigerator in the corner. “There’s only room for one thing in that fridge’s freezer, and that’s Rita’s heart.”
“I keep my seltzer there—” Becca stared at the refrigerator as if a glowing heart throbbed through a translucent door.
“You want to see it? It’s in a plastic bag.”
“No—” Becca stood. She’d lost feeling in her feet and reached past Ethan’s elbow to grab a corner of the desk. “Lunchtime’s over.”
Most evenings, Becca struggled to suppress her work-week hunger, but the night she learned of Rita’s frozen heart, she had no appetite. Her own refrigerator threatened her, and instead of the yogurt she’d planned on, she munched Special K from a box. She watched the family with nineteen kids mill about on her TV while she poked at her iPad.
Romeo and Juliet. Anna Karenina. Was there a book to replace her heart? If she died, who would choose it? An email message blinked in Becca’s inbox, and she caught her breath: it was from Katie, whom she hadn’t heard from in
half a year. The subject was “my girls,” and the first thing Becca saw when she opened it was a photograph of six little girls seated in a semi-circle. Each cradled an identical naked baby doll, except for a heavy girl with braids who balanced hers on her palm as if it were flying. This doll’s head was still wrapped in plastic—the dolls must have been fresh donations. Katie’s message read, These are my girls with their new dolls. I got an A. Was it worth it?
The message and photo had also been sent to Danielle, who Becca knew wouldn’t be able to access it in her Ecuadorian village. Any reply would be Becca’s responsibility. What was there to say? Congrats for the A? Cute Kids? The message was a cue for an apology or at least an explanation. Dolls. Becca thought of the Russian nesting dolls, the matryoshka, and typed, You never know you’re at the last doll until you try so hard to open it that you crush it. She imagined pinching a pea-sized matryoshka into dust, then saw herself stirring the false ashes in Rita’s urn. She cleared her reply to Katie—it could wait. They were on different sides of the world now, each committed to a different “we.”
“I need the heart,” Becca told Ethan the next day. “Tomorrow’s Friday, and Nick and I go to the Golden Corral. Knowing what I know, how can I face him across the table?”
“What are you going to do with it?” Ethan asked. “You can’t just stick it in the urn.”
Becca shrugged. “I’ll incinerate it myself and put the ashes where they belong. I know you tried to do the right thing, but last night I couldn’t sleep, thinking about it.” She’d lain in bed for hours, envisioning empty coffin-cradles and matryoshka dolls shrinking in endless mirrors. She’d seen a giant heart pumping a fountain of chocolate blood. She’d become ravenous, and thought of the men at Memory Garden Cremation Services. Then she’d touched herself, her fingers hidden behind the gentle swell of her empty stomach.
“I love your muffin top—” she’d heard Nick sigh in the dark as an ambulance moaned down a distant street.
“I love your muffin top—” Ethan’s voice had joined in, and Becca had squirmed with the dangerous pleasure she shared with both her men.
“You won’t be able to get it hot enough.” Ethan dragged his fingers through his curls.
“I’ll figure it out,” Becca said.
And a few hours later at the end of the workday Ethan dropped the frozen heart into the shopping bag Becca held open. She glimpsed a red lump for just a second before its weight tugged at her wrists.
“Bring it back if whatever you try doesn’t work,” Ethan said. “You can’t just cook it up like a steak.”
“Scat—” Becca whispered at the skeletal cat in her stairwell. She hadn’t seen it in months, and it grinned at her with needle teeth when she told it to “Go home.” She hoisted the bag with the heart high on her chest as she unlocked her apartment door and slipped inside. She hurried to her freezer and felt a cool puff as she opened it. She withdrew the heart from the bag, worried it might have softened, but it was still stone-hard. Bright red patches showed through the frost covering it. Did the thing that killed Rita still lurk inside? Becca tucked the frozen organ between a carton of ice milk and a bag of Green Giant broccoli florettes.
How would she turn the heart to ashes? The only thing she’d ever burned was toast. She couldn’t fry it—that would just cook it, like Ethan had warned. She imagined the odor of a cooking heart—like barbecued ribs? It was Thursday evening, the last of her fasting nights before her Golden Corral Friday with Nick, and she imagined them sitting in their booth, their overflowing plates between them: how innocent he’d been of the deception she was determined to correct. Becca studied her oven’s controls. Five-hundred-fifty degrees was its maximum setting, nowhere near the two thousand plus degrees Ethan said the cremator reached. The oven had a self-cleaning function. Didn’t that burn the hottest? She’d check the internet.
According to Ethan, an incinerated body came out of the cremator in a compacted chunk. A machine called a cremulator stirred this chunk into ashes and sifted out non-combustibles, metal from repaired joint sockets, for instance, or overlooked jewelry.
“I found a ring once, had it cleaned at a jeweler’s, and gave it to my wife,” he said. “She put it on, admired it, then asked where it came from. When I hesitated, she took it off and threw it at me. She was right. Keeping cremation leftovers for personal use violates best practice.” Ethan’s tone had reminded Becca of Nick’s when he’d explained why Golden Corral didn’t allow doggy bags: “It’s ‘all-you-can-eat’ for one meal, not forever.”
Becca sat on her futon, opened her laptop, and puzzled over key phrases to search: “generating extreme heat”? “ashes”? She paused to check her messages before connecting to Google. Only spam in her inbox, and the message from Katie that had reached her all the way from the Ukraine. She reopened it: there were the little girls with their baby dolls. Wasn’t it likely that these children were orphans? Which one might Nick have picked if his wife hadn’t died? It would be simple to ask: Are these orphans? But Katie’s question still hung: Was it worth it? That was a question for the life Becca had left behind.
What was Becca searching? How hot does an oven get when it self-cleans? Because she had a heart in her freezer that needed burning. If she didn’t take care of it right away, what might happen to it? After a week, after a month, it would get pushed back into the frigid shadows, buried behind bags of ravioli, lost beneath frozen pizzas. But of course she’d get to it eventually, the incineration. Even if the heart wasn’t always foremost in her thoughts, it would still be waiting for her, frozen and beatless. If Becca got her act together—when she got it together, maybe she’d be free of the men she’d been collected with at Memory Garden Crematory Services. Maybe there’d be law school, marriage, children. But the heart would follow her through a lifetime of freezers, wouldn’t it? Whenever Becca came across it in its frost-covered plastic bag, it would remind her that some things change and some things last forever. Until she threw it away.
Obligates
Talia’s ten-day round trip to Florida to check on her family’s undeveloped New Smyrna Beach property is nearly over. She sails east on the Mass Pike. Wellesley—home—is less than fifty miles away. Unless, as if she’s the victim of some adult version of Chutes and Ladders, she’ll blink away the sun blazing from the cars and trucks streaming around her and find she’s still down hundreds of miles of highway and is back in Virginia or North Carolina. Since the very first mile of her round trip, she’s been lost—turned inside out—within her own life story, which she envisions as a graphic memoir in black and white.
The dashboard clock says it’s nearly eleven—Talia will get to town just in time for the “Book Babies” session for toddlers and their mommies she leads at the public library. Songs and stories, clapping hands and rhymes. “The wheels on the bus,” she rehearses, tapping the steering wheel, “go ‘round and ‘round.” Talia’s imagined at least a hundred illustrations for her memoir, each picture as vivid as a recurring dream, each as bold as any one of the hundred plus tattoos on her arms and legs she hides on the job under long sleeves and tights. But her Florida trip is almost over, and three thousand miles haven’t been enough for her to shape all her pictures into a coherent narrative. Images swirl like birds drunk on rotten berries: to catch them she’d need a stronger mind—or the talent to actually draw something.
Talia glances in the rearview, where her reflection burns through the chaos of day-dreamed pictures. Because she’s on her way to work, she’s not wearing the jewelry that usually plugs her piercings. In an illustration she’s conjured for the cover of her memoir, the tiny holes in her white skin are the width of dimes: one in her cheek; one below her lower lip; one above her right nostril; one through her septum. A version of this picture shows curious children—her Book Babies— poking their fingers into these holes. The chrome mask of a too-close truck grill crowds her mirror, and Talia sucks in a breath. She taps the b
rake pedal, and the grill lurches closer, then recedes. A red flash—tail lights in front of her—traffic has stopped, and a Connecticut license plate rushes at her. Talia stomps on the brake, grits her teeth, and bucks to a stop a foot short of impact. Her ex loaned her his car for this trip out of guilt after he confessed to cheating on her. She stares at the license plate of the car she almost hit: SI-3460. “SI,” as in “Sinclair,” her ex. Will everything always remind her of him?
Ahead of her, as far as she can see, traffic is still. The brake pedal squashed under her foot feels like a small animal trying to escape. She’s taller than her ex, and she’s had to slide the seat back to fit comfortably behind the wheel. Sinclair never bothered to strip the Framingham State University sticker from the back window after buying the vehicle used from a young woman he claims to have charmed into accepting a ridiculously low offer. Rust stains the wheel wells. Don’t judge me by this, Talia pleads silently to the stalled drivers who are suddenly her neighbors. This isn’t my car. The chapter of her graphic memoir dealing with Sinclair is titled “The X.” She gives him Xs for eyes in all his pictures, like dead bodies in comic strips, even the one that shows him introducing himself to her in a coffee shop. Another picture, labeled “SINK, LIAR,” shows her dead-eyed ex chin-deep in steaming shit—in the stink-lines wavering above his head is another image of him, X-eyes bulging as he humps a faceless, dark-haired woman. Talia is a natural blonde.
The seven-year-old self Talia pictures in her graphic memoir can draw. She lies flopped on her belly and elbows in the shade of the RV her parents rented for their first-and-only Florida vacation. She carves hearts and angel wings in the cool sand with a small plastic baby doll she holds like a crayon. In her memory Talia hears the murmured pulse of the surf, the jagged cry of gulls, her parents’ monosyllabic conversation. The doll is the only toy she’s been allowed to bring from home because, “you don’t want sand to ruin your good things, do you?” The doll is so smooth nothing adheres to it, but gritty sand clings to Talia’s sunscreen-drenched arms. A cluster of beach grass shivers, not ten feet from where she lies. Something that looks like a living rock drags itself through the brush.
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