by Rita Ciresi
He joined me on the couch and we turned on the TV. Dodie wielded the remote. He channel—surfed so fast I felt assaulted by the bright and cheesy commercials for ineffective deodorants and overpriced cars. The Saturday night movie was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? I sighed over Sidney Poitier. Dodie cruised onto PBS, a channel he claimed to loathe because it was overpopulated with thin, handsome gee—gees posturing as straights. But tonight there was no Mystery, no Masterpiece Theatre, nor yet another dull Edwardian novel turned into a miniseries. Instead, there was an Indian man in a white turban, a professor at Cambridge, lecturing on the mind—body problem.
Dodie put down the remote and I didn’t protest. The man’s lilting voice was mesmerizing. Dodie’s lips rose a little with pleasure when the man said “experience” and “mysterious” in his singsong way. The professor talked about the overlap between science and religion, the use of positive thinking and meditation to overcome pain and hunger and chronic diseases, the brain as the center of memory and the internalization of time, the human imagination as it creates its God. He talked of a doctor who discovered, while performing delicate surgery on a patient under local anesthesia, that if he gently pressed upon the patient’s brain, the patient recalled and reexperienced memories from as far back as infancy. The brain was like a sponge: each press seeped forth another drop of time.
After the lecture was over, Dodie turned off the TV. We sat on the couch with our knees hugged up to our chests, our chins resting on top, and wondered aloud at what memories would spring to the surface if a brain surgeon pressed his fingers upon our minds. This was just another way of reminiscing, but it forced us to be selective and pick out the most important details that could be reexperienced. Dodie began.
What about the time we went to Sea Gull Beach after the hurricane and that huge silvery fish was washed up on shore and your dad dragged it out to the water three or four times before it finally made it back out to sea?
How about that wicked thunderstorm in the first grade when we had to run downstairs and take refuge in the boys’ bathroom? That was the first time Td ever seen a urinal. I remember thinking, Why do boys pee into sinks?
Do you remember levitating in the cellar? Séances in the basement under that bare lightbulb with the string dangling? Playing funeral in the Christmas—tree box?
That ghost story Jocko told about the woman who bought the used car and the previous owners face kept reappearing in the rearview mirror?
Dodie and I were the perfect partners for this game, because we shared not only our childhood, but our response to it. We both were intrigued by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—another book we did not realize was a Christian parable—me for the pictures, Dodie for the mysterious word wireless that he did not understand and that he did not want to define, loving the mystery. We both were moved by The Diary of Anne Frank—the hiding, the problems with the parents, the scene where Peter spills the beans, the last page where she talks about her divided self, and that crucial moment that always made me weep, turning the page and reading the sparse paragraph about the Gestapo invading the Secret Annexe—the thought that she died just two months before the liberation of Holland. Dodie and I both loved the idea of a large dog playing a nurse—and the picture of Wendy sewing the shadow back onto Peter’s feet, Tinker Bell glowing angrily overhead—in the Arthur Rackham edition of Peter Pan. We loved how Pinocchio kept on lying, but by the end of the novel earned the right to be a real boy instead of a puppet.
The more Dodie and I talked and laughed, the more inconceivable it seemed to me that either one of us could ever die. What we shared with one another went too deep to be buried in a grave. If there was a paradise, maybe it was nothing more than memory: the chilled smell of our grandfather’s fruit cellar. The crack in the blacktop behind the garage in the shape of Florida. The rough bark of the apple tree that functioned, during games of hide—and—seek, as home base. Blood soup made from the berries on the scraggly bushes that grew in our front yard. The long walk down the aisle together, dressed in white, to receive our First Holy Communion and to receive the blessing from the archbishop as we confirmed our desire to be Catholics for the rest of our lives and to take, as part of that pledge, the name of a saint. The names were supposed to be secret—but I knew Dodie’s name and he knew mine. He had taken the name of the captain of the heavenly host, the archangel Michael, while I had chosen the name of the woman who wiped Christ’s face as he walked toward Calvary—Veronica—because my imagination was captured by the story of how the imprint of Christ’s features came away upon her veil.
Veronica’s veil was supposed to be preserved in Saint Peter’s in Rome. Dodie said he was thinking about making a pilgrimage to Italy over the summer and wanted to know if I’d come along for at least part of the ride. “Let’s do it,” I said. “We can flirt with the waiters—”
“Didn’t I say pilgrimage?”
“Didn’t I say flirt? It’s not a sin if I ask some Luigi in a white shirt what he recommends for the entrée.”
Dodie looked pensive. “One can only hope God has better things to worry about than that.”
I dropped Dodie at the train station just before noon. I felt his fingers splayed on my back when he hugged me. The train pulled in, slow and wheezing. After Dodie got on, he took the first available seat by the window, and I waved to him through the grimy glass, but he didn’t see me. Then the train pulled away.
When, I returned home, I realized I was exhausted even though I’d already had three cups of coffee. I wondered if I wasn’t just having my usual Sunday blues compounded by a psychosomatic reaction to the big news at work: that Strauss was pulling back into town next week. But my throat was sore. In fact, it was killing me. I gargled with salt—Morton’s—and water. A half hour later I gargled again, this time more worried about Dodie than myself. Dodie wasn’t supposed to be around anyone sick. He wasn’t supposed to go into a day—care center or a doctor’s waiting room or sit too long in an airport or a train station or anywhere else where his compromised immune system might latch onto something virulent. Now he had spent twenty—four hours in my contagious presence. But if I called him and told him exactly how lousy I felt, I thought I might trigger his hypochondria, and he’d get sick from the stress more than the actual illness.
I sat down on the couch—only to wake up an hour and a half later. My throat was so raw that when I sipped a drink of water, it felt like swallowing sand. It took all the effort I had to go into the kitchen and make some tea. The faucet felt heavy as cast iron. The spigot was hard to twist, like the sealed top of a salad—dressing bottle yet to be opened. The effort was tremendous just to bend down and fetch a tea bag from the bottom drawer. My wrists hurt. The back of my thighs ached. I felt like someone was sitting on my chest.
I slept the night away, hoping I’d wake up fine in the morning, but instead I woke up late enough so it didn’t look good when I called in sick to work—like I probably had a hangover. But I didn’t even care. Everything about Boorman seemed trivial. I had a fever and I was coughing. Then I had to do it: call Dodie to tell him I really had something and it was probably contagious. I called, but to my relief (because it meant he wasn’t sick—he was at work) no one answered. I left more coughs than words on Dodie’s machine, but managed to eke out this croaky message: “Dodici Diodetto: You deliberately left War and Peace sitting like a dog turd on my carpet—but can’t say I blame you. Call me.”
I slept through another morning and afternoon of this, hot and sweaty in my PJs. Then I began to fever—dream, first of a hallway long as the Lincoln Tunnel and lined with yellow tiles on the walls and ceiling. I knew the hall was in a hospital because it smelled like cruciferous vegetables and cottage cheese and iodine and Band—Aids, and because I was wearing a paper gown, tied in the back, and I didn’t have anything on underneath. With the lack of shame found only in dreams, I didn’t even care—in fact, it kind of intrigued me—that my bare butt could be viewed by all the world. I wanted
someone to see me.
At the end of the empty hall was a door. When I pushed it open, Dodie lay in a hospital bed, a paper mask stretched over the bottom of his face. In the corner, Auntie Beppina sat by the window, her hands folded in prayer. Then she disappeared.
Where’s your father? I said to Dodie.
Where’s your father?
My fathers dead, I said.
I can’t see my father, Dodie said.
Then I noticed Dodie was blind, his eyes a wash of yellow, like thin pudding.
I gotta go, Dodie said.
Go where? Where you going, Dodie?
No, go. You know, go.
But where were the nurses? There weren’t any nurses. I walked over to a box of rubber gloves, but the pair I tried on wouldn’t fit. Fuck it, I said, and reached beneath the nightstand to pull out a red plastic urinal shaped like a dildo. I didn’t even blink when the dildo/urinal said, Call me the gentleman’s friend.
I propped it by Dodie’s emaciated leg, then peeled back the sheet and lifted Dodie’s hospital robe. His skin was jaundiced and puckered at the top of his legs. In a sad, abandoned nest of hair lay his genitals, pink with a purplish undertone. I took his penis in my hand, and even though the rest of him was so thin and limp, I felt it harden, and I didn’t know what to say or do.
Dodie’s smile stretched the elastic cords on his hospital mask. I know you’ve always wanted to see my tool, he said. Voilà. The lethal weapon.
I laughed. It’s a monstrous jewel. Oh. It’s so big it takes my breath away.
Dodie’s stomach started to shake with laughter, and then his pee came pouring out the moment after I tucked him into the gentleman’s friend. Dodie laughed so hard he started to choke, and I stepped back just in time to avoid the phlegm—creamy and viscous as semen—that he coughed onto the bed sheet.
The nurse gasped when she came to the door and saw the gentleman’s friend in my hand. Are you crazy? she asked. Don’t you know what he has? Get in there and dump that urine out, and don’t spill it.
I was in the bathroom. I was crying so hard, it felt like laughing. I was holding the gentleman’s friend the way the priest held the golden cup of wine in his hands, and I was thinking of tilting it back and drinking Dodie’s piss like poison. I wanted to pour it over my head and drown in its mess. But I tilted it into the toilet, and when the urine came out brown and tinged with blood—why wasn’t there more? There was so very little of it!—I realized I must still like my life, because with true survivor’s instinct I washed my hands ten times over.
I woke clammy with sweat. I thrashed and turned and dreamed some more. I was driving my Jeep down a hill. On the opposite side of the street was a string of cars with their lights on, and I knew it was a funeral procession although I did not see the hearse, and the steering wheel went loose in my hands and the gas pedal limp beneath my feet, and the brakes, the brakes, where were the brakes? They were at the beach—Dodie and I were at the beach, and we were twelve years old again and the sunlight glinted on Dodie’s soft brown hair and the jut of his shoulder blades. Then we were six and running down the alley behind the church after watching Barabbas, running as if to outstrip leprosy, knowing disease and death were the ways that God sought you out, and He could always find you. Stop running. Stop running, Lise! Dodie shouted. Because at the bottom was a chain—link fence crowned with barbed wire and we were going to hit it.…
I woke. I felt like a hand was on my shoulder. Wake up. Wake up, Lise. The phone was ringing and ringing. I sat up, and when the phone went quiet and the answering machine picked up, my sister’s tight voice broadcast Dodie’s death. Carol kept repeating until the tape ran out, “Oh Lise, you were born on the same day, you were born on the same day …”
The official word was pneumonia, but the unspoken one was suicide—a vial of tranquilizers downed in the span of time between the morning clinic visit that confirmed the presence of pneumonia cells and the afternoon visit to Dodie’s private physician, who was on the staff of Saint Luke’s and was prepared to check Dodie in. Drowsy and disoriented, Dodie had passed out—like a girl—at the doctor’s office before he even had a chance to give his name to the receptionist. On the ambulance ride to Saint Luke’s, Dodie’s heart probably had given out in a midtown traffic jam, to the distress and confusion of the paramedics, and to the relief of Dodie, who did not want to waste away in a ward where death was delivered as regularly as bread—or fall into a sleep from which he would never awake, only to have his corpse rot for days before it was discovered.
Auntie Beppina couldn’t stop talking about those tranquilizers. Even after she discovered Dodie had pneumonia and Uncle Gianni told her where and how and why you got that kind of pneumonia, she still said, “But the pills. Why would he take the pills? Where do you get such pills?” and Carol’s face went white, knowing how easy it was to get your hands on a vial and write your own ticket to the grave.
In lieu of flowers, the family asked nothing—only that we didn’t say that shameful word suicide, because then the priest wouldn’t give him a decent burial. I kept my mouth closed—when I wasn’t coughing, and I was still coughing pretty badly after driving my Jeep back to Connecticut, ten miles under the speed limit, my mouth dry from the antibiotics I was taking and the terror I felt to be behind the wheel. Anything could happen.
The coffin was closed. No wake. Still, I asked Auntie Beppina if I could see Dodie one last time. She shook her head. “They screwed down the lid,” she kept saying. “They screwed down the lid.”
But they hadn’t. I asked the funeral director. He told me he would open it for a moment if I agreed not to touch Dodie. I no longer wanted to touch Dodie. But I had to see him. It didn’t seem real until I saw him. Viewing was the only way I could believe my father was really dead. After I saw Daddy’s body, I had moved away from the coffin and cried in the black—and—white—tiled bathroom of that very same funeral home, thanking God I’d never have to look at my father again in this life and know that I did not love him nor did he love me.
And so I looked. And so I saw. And so I nodded. And so I remembered you, Dodie: You who were the altar boy who held the cup of ashes on those cold February mornings that marked the beginning of the days of deprivation known as Lent, when the priest took his thumb and ground the ash into my forehead, reminding me that we came from dust and to dust we would return.
The sun shone on the morning of your funeral. The metal rollers on the back of the hearse clattered like the belt in the butcher shop that delivered the sides of beef to the freezer. Your brothers carried you up the aisle. The priest who heard your first confession gave the blessing. Your mother sobbed in the front pew. Your father was so drunk it was a wonder he could stand straight. Weak—kneed, I coughed so much I was like Poison in a croquet game—everyone moved away.
There was a reading from the Gospel according to John. In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.
Your brothers carried you back down the aisle. The hearse glittered in the sunshine, and in the back of the hushed limousine where I sat with my sister’s hand in mine, I gazed down on the dull brown water beneath the Q Bridge. The green gates of Saint Lawrence welcomed us into the cemetery. The grave was unmarked but open. Once again the rollers squeaked. Your brothers were confused about where to put you—to the right of the open grave or the left—and almost dropped the coffin. Another reading. Said the Bible: I am the foolish man, which built his house upon the sand. What do I have left to cling to? I closed my eyes when they lowered your coffin into the ground. Your father used a shovel to throw the first clods on the lid. Then he kept on shoveling, as if this way he could bury you forever, and Jocko had to reach out and say, “Dad. Dad. What are you doing, Dad? Stop it. Cut it out.”
At the party afterward (for no Italian funeral was complete without going back to the house and tackling a basket of rolls and cold meats and a platter of roasted vegetables and sloshing back gallons of liquor), your godm
other—my mother—said, “I always said those eyelashes were wasted on a boy.” Your cousin—my sister—wiped away tears as she said, “Well, Lisa, now you can get on with your life.” And Al, the guy we both had laughed at all these years, was the only one who seemed to understand my grief He asked me if I wanted to hold Junior.
I shook my head. I was afraid I’d drop him.
“Can I get you something, Lise?” Al asked.
I shook my head again.
“Do you want me to leave you alone?” He sat down next to me. “I’ll listen if there’s something you want to say.”
But there was nothing to say. I sat there with Al until Junior rustled, then let out a whimper, and finally broke into a full—blown wail of distress, and I reacted to the baby’s cry the same way I responded to a glorious piece of music—as if someone had stuck a fist down my throat and pulled up from the bottom of my soul my very name.
Chapter Nineteen
Somebunny Loves You
On the day we were scheduled to clean out Dodie’s apartment, I made excuses to Auntie Beppina about meeting someone in New York for breakfast so I could get there before she did. My first reason was selfish: I wanted to sit there quietly, for a few minutes, in Dodie’s space, the way I would sit in a church. My second reason was more altruistic: I knew I had to get rid of Dodie’s drugs and erotic photographs and even 800’s talking dildo (if it really existed in the first place) before Auntie Beppina pulled it out of some drawer, asked “What’s this?” and pushed the button that would give her an indirect answer: Y’all come!