Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  I traced the hand back to the face of a stranger in a dark gray skirt-suit, her eyes lit by fear and compassion as she repeated my birth name and her assurances. The color of her green-flecked eyes seemed vaguely familiar, as did her strawberry-blond hair, which curled inward, once at her neck, like a breaking wave. The wear of gravity had slackened her skin and time had coarsened it, obscuring who she once had been to me, but when the corner of her lip turned in a timid smile, I recognized through the mask of years the face of my sister. I called her name, Sharon, and she nodded.

  “I thought you were a stranger when you first came in.” She pointed to the chair in the darkest corner of the room, where she had been sitting. “I almost didn’t recognize you. God, what’s it been, twenty-plus years? The last time I saw you, I don’t even want to think about it. You were, what? Six years old? My baby sister. And your hair, it was blond, fell halfway down your back. God, you were such a cute little girl.”

  “Times change,” I said.

  She fingered my hair, examining the color and, perhaps, just wanting to touch me. It occurred to me that I should hug her, but it had been so long since I’d seen her it would have been embracing a stranger and I was still too near my rage; I still wanted to hit someone. I stepped back to put some distance between us, made it seem like I wanted to look at her more fully. She had the manicured look of someone who took good care of herself, but beneath the makeup the years on her face did not look to have been easy ones. “Funny,” I said, “in all my memories of you, I see this really tall girl looming over me. But you’re really kind of tiny.”

  She hooked her hair over her ears, gave me the same appraising look I’d given her, said, “And I remember you being much shorter, too.” She laughed and covered her mouth. A look of panic darted her eyes to the side and her weight shifted from foot to foot. “You don’t know how many times I wanted to come back, see how you were doing. God, at least a hundred. But I couldn’t do it, no matter how much I wanted. You know why?”

  I nodded. I knew. It made me no less angry, but I knew.

  “I swore I’d never see him again and I’ve kept my word. Did you see the shiner he gave her? Did he have to beat her all the way to her grave?” She laughed again. It was a nervous little laugh, as though what she said frightened her. “Maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe she fell when, you know, when she had her stroke. I guess that’s what she had. That’s what Ray told me anyway. Maybe she hit her eye like that. When she fell. If she fell.” She rocked from side to side, feet arched in low-heeled gray pumps. “I don’t know nothing no more, been away from the family so long.”

  “No, I think he hit her,” I said.

  The fact of it lay heavily in the room. I turned away from my sister and looked again at my mother. The makeup didn’t conceal her scars. A sliver of skin still divided one of her eyebrows, which never completely healed from the blow that split it. She had taken stitches in her lip once, when I was a child, and the dotted pattern of it still marked her. Her face did not look peaceful in death.

  It looked scarred.

  Seven

  WHAT DO you say to someone you haven’t seen for twenty-four years, who even during the years you knew her was nothing more than a large, mysterious person who doted on you one moment, ignored you completely the next? I remember adoring my sister as a child, in the hero-worshipping way children have with much older siblings, and I remember after she’d run away from home how long I’d hoped for her return, and I also remember forgetting her, slowly over the years, when that return never came, her image fading to the shadow of someone I loved but never really knew. The years buried that childhood love and longing, and as I stared at my sister over a cup of coffee in the local Denny’s restaurant I wondered whether I could ever recapture those feelings or whether they were any more alive than bones buried a quarter century ago.

  She’d bounced around since leaving home at the age of sixteen, living at first in a commune near San Francisco, she said, then moving gradually up the coast until finally settling in Seattle, where she currently worked as a real estate agent, selling homes to an upper-middle-class clientele in the exclusive Belleview district. She’d lived something of a wild youth and though she wasn’t particularly proud of all the things she’d done, times were different then. She laughed at herself—in fact, she seemed to carry on a continuous and critical inner dialogue with herself as she spoke—and said she’d become the straightest, most respectable person she knew. Her hands lay clasped together on the table, knuckles white with strain, as though holding them together cost her supreme effort and would, if she relaxed her grip, fly about the room in unfettered gestures. She liked it in Seattle, she said, enjoyed hiking in the rain forest or taking a boat onto Puget Sound. She caught herself boasting about all the things she liked to do and laughed self-consciously. “It’s not like I get out near as much as it sounds,” she said. “I’m working most of the time, and when I’m not working, something else always seems to come up. Plus you have to realize most people look for a new home on the weekend. I wish I had the time to do all the things I like to do, rather than what I gotta do to pay the rent. How about you? Do you still live in the area? What do you do here?”

  “I’m down in Venice Beach,” I said. “I’m a freelance photographer, working mostly for the tabloids.”

  “Tabloids? You mean, like the papers by the supermarket cash register? That kind of thing?”

  “That kind exactly.”

  She glanced down at her hands and nodded as though trying to decide whether that was good or bad. From the evasiveness of her glance I guessed she concluded the latter. “Does that pay anything?”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” I shouldn’t have said anything more, because it felt as though I was trying to justify myself. She was the one who disappeared. I didn’t need to justify myself to her. “Last month I cashed a check for twenty grand.”

  Her lips bowed outward in a silent wow. “Just for taking somebody’s photo?”

  “More or less. It was an exclusive. But that’s a rarity. Most months I make considerably less than that.”

  “What do you do with the money?”

  “Put it in the bank.”

  “You should put half that money into something safe, like a money market fund, save up to buy a place of your own. No better investment than real estate.” She leaned back in the booth and laughed, her hands briefly flying apart before she tracked them down like errant children, waving in the air between us. “Listen to me, I’m giving you a sales pitch. It’s just that I’ve had to learn the hard way about these things. You ever been married?”

  “Once, and briefly,” I said.

  “My second husband worked in a bank, and he may have been lacking in some ways, but he really knew his way around investments.” She told me all about him, their mostly happy eight years together in Seattle. He’d wanted children and she couldn’t have any. They’d broken up a couple of years ago and she’d suffered the kind of midlife crisis that hits many women from their late thirties on: she’d devoted too much of her energy caring for her husband and didn’t have a career that would support her. She took some courses in real estate, got a job, and was doing so well she swore she’d never get married again, because men always break your heart. Her first husband, a butcher by trade, was so promiscuous that when women walked into the store asking “Where’s the beef?” they weren’t talking about the meat inside the display case. The marriage lasted two years. I let her talk, because it seemed something she liked to do. She was telling the story of her life and it didn’t matter so much that her style was so breezily impersonal she could have been talking to her beautician or the stranger on the bar stool next to her. Twenty-four years is a lot of time to catch up on and I don’t suppose I should have expected her to confide in me as a sister.

  When she paused to signal the waitress for more coffee I asked, “What do you know about the funeral?”

  “Ray told me it’s tomorrow morning, at the funeral
home.”

  “Want to go together?”

  “I’m not going,” she said.

  “You flew all the way down here and you’re not going?”

  I must have put some anger into my voice because Sharon sat rigidly back in the booth as though slapped and said, “First of all, I didn’t fly down. I was already here when I heard.”

  “Why did you come down then, if not for family?”

  “Private business,” she said, like it was none of my concern. “And second, I lit a candle for her in church this morning.”

  “You’re religious?”

  “Religious enough to hold my own ceremony. A private one. I meant it when I swore I’d never see the old man again. I’m not going to dignify his so-called grief. I’m not going to cry in front of him, not ever again.”

  I remembered my pop slapping me to the floor, then taunting me, You gonna cry now, go running to your mommy? I remembered rushing to hit him and how he allowed my fists to flail against his chest before he trapped my arms in a bear hug, kissed me on the cheek, called me Poppy’s little girl. I said, “You think I’m not gonna want to take a chair to his head the moment I see him?”

  Something in the way I phrased the question got her attention. She looked up at me, her eyes suddenly inquisitive. It was the first moment I sensed that in some way I interested her. She asked, “Did he beat you, too?”

  “He hit everybody.”

  “Looks like you developed some armor.” She cocked her head and appeared about to say something that cut through the bullshit, but hesitated long enough for caution to blank it out. “But just because I’m not going to the funeral doesn’t mean we won’t see each other again. I don’t fly out until Monday. I’m staying with an old friend, Anne Chambers. Do you remember her?”

  I shook my head.

  “No reason you should.” Her voice ascended a couple of octaves and sweetened at the edges. “You were so small! Well, Anne and I have kept in touch over the years. I’m staying with her and her husband while I’m here.”

  “How about lunch tomorrow, after the service?” I suggested. “I don’t expect I’ll be the most popular face with Pop and Ray. Maybe you’ll want to hear how it went. I know I could use a little support, even after the fact.”

  Again, an inquisitiveness came into her eyes before caution—or just timidity—glossed it over. Maybe she feared emotional closeness. Given our family, I couldn’t blame her. “I’d love to,” she said, drawing out the last word. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you I want to spend as much time together as we can.” Her smile was so sweet but completely false that I wondered, Why is my sister lying to me?

  I stopped in a church on the drive back to my apartment. I didn’t even know what kind of church it was until I sneaked through the door, sat at the outer edge of the back pew, noticed lit candles on altars along the walls leading to the main deal in front. The Catholics used candles as symbols of prayer, I remembered that much. Catholic or Protestant, it made little difference to me. Sharon and I hadn’t gone to church much as children, just once or twice a year when our mother’s guilt at raising us as heathens overwhelmed her. Still, my sister’s religious conversion shouldn’t have surprised me. The church offers consolation to those whose lives are troubled, and my sister must have needed that consolation during the early, difficult years of her independence. I think my mother would have attended church more regularly if not for Pop’s hard-assed opposition to becoming part of the Bible-thumping set, as he called it. He sulked those rare times we did go to church and sometimes broke into one of his characteristic rages, and then one of us would bear the mark of it for weeks.

  I crept forward, skirting the edge of the pews, until I sat next to the candlelit painting of a woman praying. A brass plaque identified the portrait as St. Anne. I stared at the image, trying to remember my mother’s living face, and summoned no more than snapshots torn from the flow of time and stashed haphazardly away. Her face appeared in the background of my childhood memories, constantly present, but never in focus, as though I’d always taken her for granted without ever precisely looking at her. I thought I should pray and tried reciting the Lord’s Prayer, but I’d never properly memorized it and stumbled over the lines about debts and trespassing. A Catholic prayer might have been more appropriate but I hadn’t been exposed to any, except in the abbreviated form cited in films when someone is getting ready to die, and couldn’t remember past Hail Mary, full of grace. An old man walked by, dressed in black, a white tooth of cloth at his neck. I said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  The old man planted his cane to the floor and pivoted around it, his shoulders bowed toward his chest, and he carefully lowered himself onto the pew in front of me, the grip of his hands on the cane easing the strain on his legs. “You don’t mind if I sit, do you?” As though he needed my permission. He turned to stick me with a curious look, his rootlike fingers lacing the cane’s wooden curve. “I’m Father Morales. I haven’t seen you here before, have I?”

  “First time.” I pointed to the portrait of the saint to my right. “St. Anne, who was she?”

  He leaned back to better see who asked a question with such an obvious answer. “The mother of Mary, the grandmother of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  I nodded, said, “Guess that’s how she got to be a saint.”

  “She became a saint by living a holy life and because she led a holy life the Lord chose her for a holy task. She proves herself to us every day by answering our prayers. Do you have any children?”

  He was a kind old man, his eyes like antique bottle glass, and traces of Aztec or some other ancient Indian lineage rounding the edges from his face. I didn’t want to laugh at the absurdity of his question. In his world, women were born to marry and have children. I doubted many of his parishioners knew the kind of life I’d led. “No sir,” I said.

  “Well, your mother had you and her mother had her. If they prayed to St. Anne, she listened. She’s the patron saint of pregnant women.” His hands flexed against the cane and he pushed himself up. “You’re always welcome here as a guest or to make the Church your home.” He gave me a little wave of his hand and shuffled toward the front of the church.

  I moved to the railing before the altar to St. Anne and thought about my grandmother, who died early in my teens, and though I didn’t believe then in any specific afterlife, I thought of my mother in her mother’s arms and that image gave me a small moment of peace. I dug through my pockets for a few dollar bills, stuffed them into the slot before the altar, and lit two candles. As the candles flamed into life I wished fervently that my mother and her mother before her find peace and grace, in whatever form they might now reside, even if their sole remaining residence lay in my own heart. It was the only prayer I felt capable of giving. I watched the candles burn, and when the church began to fill for evening mass, I said my thanks to the place and left.

  Eight

  THE TERMfuneral home is one of the great unchallenged oxymorons of our time, as though calling a place home where dead people are embalmed or cremated could warm the chill of death. The services were held in a wood-paneled chapel with cushioned pews, vaulted ceilings, and a stained-glass window depicting a sun that either was rising or setting, depending on your philosophical view. A simple wooden cross hung above the altar, present for the faithful but inconspicuous enough to be ignored by the agnostic. My mother may have called herself a Christian but hadn’t been to church in twenty years, and so it was her fate to be memorialized by a rent-a-pastor who stood at the podium and mouthed platitudes about the glories of heaven, never having been there himself and never having met the woman he eulogized. He knew nothing about her except her name and the names of a few of her surviving relatives, which he read from a slip of paper clipped to the podium, and he recited a brief, personal story about how she rose at dawn every morning to feed her husband breakfast before he left for work, to demonstrate, I suppose, what a kind and loving woman she’d been. Not so curiously,
the list of surviving relatives did not include my name or the name of my sister.

  The chapel was large enough to accommodate two hundred mourners, and twelve people showed up to see her off, hardly filling the first two pews. Two of my father’s pals from the machine shop accompanied him on one side, and my brother’s family lined up on the other. Our neighbors from down the street, Jackie and Bob, and four of my mom’s co-workers at Kmart sat scattered along the opposite pews. I arrived late and sat alone in the back row. My mother had been cremated. The small pine box that held her ashes rested on a table beside the altar, lit by a baby spotlight hung from the ceiling and framed by two small arrangements of gladiolas. My mother’s name is Gladys. The flowers were a nice touch.

  Death had done for Gladys what she had never been able to summon the strength to do for herself. She had married Pop at the age of seventeen and lived with him for over forty years. She had not left him once during those years, not for a night to escape one of his drunks or for a day to reclaim her dignity after he had beaten her, nor had I ever heard her threaten to leave him. She remained faithful to her wedding vow, neither loved nor cherished, poorer rather than richer, for the worse far more than the better, and always in sickness, the psychological sickness that for inscrutable reasons bound her to him like the loose chains of a willing slave. I could have more easily forgiven her had she not tried to bind her children with those same chains. Death released her from her marriage vows and so I released her from any responsibility for the marks those chains left on me. I tried to remember the good, the earnest and enduring love I always felt for her, and I hoped she had forgiven me for burdening her life before she passed. It hadn’t been easy for her to have a convicted felon for a daughter.