by Sarah Bird
“We almost through here?”
“Uh, yeah, we’re almost through, bitch.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Whore.”
“Skank.”
“Trollop.”
“Strumpet.”
“Harlot.”
“Pox-ridden doxie.”
“Doxie! All right, Hunker! The Hunker Woman goes Shakespearean on my ass! Doxie? You are one wild woman!”
I grinned. When I was with Didi I was one wild woman. She tugged on a pair of gloves and actually helped me clean the counters for a while but ended up pretending she was a proctologist and had to perform an emergency exam on me. I was swatting and threatening to squirt bleach all over her anime outfit when the phone rang. Didi answered the phone with one hand, “Allô! Allô! Le Poop ay La Taco ici!” while she dipped the index finger of the other hand in Crisco and poked it my way.
The yellow latex finger with a white glob of Crisco on the end froze, stuck out, pointing at me for a long moment, while she listened. Then she handed the phone to me and said, “It’s your mom.”
Chapter Eight
It’s your mom.
That was all I needed to hear. My mother never called me at work and there was only one reason why she would have done it that day.
As Didi said later, the funeral was “psychedically surreal” in its awfulness. The only thing that got me through it was having her by my side. My mother tiptoed close to full-on hysteria when she found out Didi was coming. But I just blanked out her face turning red and repeated over and over, “No Didi, no me.” Mom and her cult hadn’t totally given up on me at that time so, after lengthy consultations with her pastor and the sisters, who were directing her every move in life by that time, she agreed to allow my best friend to attend.
I didn’t ask her permission to ride over with Didi to the HeartLand Compound, where she’d arranged for the funeral to be held. I just left. Nothing on earth could have gotten me to cram into the HeartLand van. Didi parked in the huge lot surrounding the complex of buildings—church, school, fellowship hall, crafts store—that was HeartLand’s Albuquerque center. Neither one of us left the ’Stang, we just watched the SUVs and vans drive up and women in lace bonnets and men in suspenders pile out and parade into the church, the men leading, the women and children following behind, as if there were dangers ahead that the head of the house would have to deal with. Indians, crack dealers, who knew? I felt as if I were watching a movie that had nothing to do with any life I could have ever imagined living.
“Jesus, why don’t they all just get buggies and be done with it?” Didi asked. “Bunch of Amish wannabes.” Didi had dressed as conservatively as she could out of respect for Daddy. But even her most sedate skirt was still a foot above her knees and her hair was currently bleached white with pink stripes.
“Come on,” Didi said, opening her door. “This will be a freak show and a half.”
The church looked like a giant wooden barn with lots of big oak beams and wooden pegs holding everything together instead of nails. Inside, all the men and boys were sitting on one side and all the women and girls were on the other.
An usher with an Abraham Lincoln beard led us to the front row and seated us next to my mother. My right side prickled where it almost touched her. I leaned away from her and into Didi. The service was worse than I imagined it would be. Of course, it had all been arranged without anyone consulting me. Hearing strangers talk about Daddy was awful. My mother hadn’t even asked if I wanted to speak. The brethren and what Didi called the sistern stood up and recounted stories that were supposed to illustrate what a good Christian Daddy was. I wanted to scream that none of them had the tiniest idea about who my father was. Daddy was a good Christian but not in the way they were talking about.
Their pastor, a tall man with broad shoulders whom the sistern all had crushes on, took the pulpit and made a big show of placing his Bible on the lectern and opening it reverently. He made a bigger show of starting to read, then looking up to show that he knew the passage by heart. “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”
My mother was sniffling beside me, dabbing at her eyes and nose with a balled-up Kleenex. The pastor looked straight at her and asked, “Sister, why do you weep? This should be a day of rejoicing, for your husband has gone before you to prepare a place just as Jesus did. If you truly believe, there should be a smile on your face.”
The prickling on my side turned to waves of revulsion when Mom obeyed, stretching her mouth into a big puppet smile that made all the sisters beam at her.
Didi popped her eyes at me to show how strange she thought it was to be told you’re not supposed to be sad at a funeral.
After the service, there was a reception in the fellowship hall next door. The HeartLanders walked into the afternoon sunshine with shoulders thrown back and satisfied looks on their faces as if they’d just cleared some pioneer land or churned a batch of butter. Some of them seemed kind and acted like they wanted to come over and say something to me. But I had shut down behind a wall of sullen hostility and glared warnings at them to keep their distance. They were happy to oblige since I was clinging to Didi, and she represented everything in the modern world they had arranged their lives around rejecting. For my mother, basking in the consolation and condolences and blessings that were being rained on her, the funeral was like a debutante ball, like her coming-out as a true HeartLand sister. I wanted her to be my mother so badly that I momentarily considered breaking into the group clustered around her, but that would have been pointless. My mother was enjoying being mothered herself too much.
Didi drifted away and I followed her toward the big showpiece of the Compound, the HeartLand Crafts Center. A large display window was piled with quilts, baskets, decoupage, pottery, beeswax candles, handmade brooms, and all manner of jams, jellies, and pickled things. In another window were manly items like handmade furniture and wrought-iron grilles. In the girl window, I recognized a quilt top I had worked on. A really intricate Double Wedding Ring pattern all in gorgeous, supersaturated shades of periwinkle and lavender, violet and marine blue, it had a $1,200 price tag on it.
“Wow,” Didi, who was also perusing some of the price tags, said, “the brethren and sistern aren’t shy about asking for the big bucks. What kind of a cut does your mom get?”
“None that I know of. It’s all supposed to go to support ‘The’ Work and ‘The’ HomeTown.” I made quote marks in the air so Didi would know that they always capitalized the words.
“What is ‘The’ HomeTown?”
“It’s their headquarters or something, somewhere down in Georgia or Mississippi. One of the hookworm states.”
Didi shook her head. “Wow, and they think I’m weird. At least I’m not making a whole life out of pretending I’m living in another century. What a bunch of freaks.”
“Nutcases,” I added, feeling a guilty thrill.
“Lunatics.”
“Psychos.”
“Amish wannabe foot-sniffers.”
I started laughing. Not good laughing either. Scary, gasping, hiccuping laughter that I couldn’t stop.
Didi watched me for a few seconds, then put her arm over my shoulder and gently led me to the ’Stang. I fell into it, never more grateful for its refuge. I calmed down the instant the door closed.
“This reception? It’s not going to work, is it?”
I shook my head no.
A few of the sisters still outside the fellowship hall stared as we pulled away.
We drove in silence over to Central, taking the street past Old Town, then up Nine Mile Hill toward the West Mesa. I watched the city shrink in the mirror on the visor until it was little more than a short streak of green winding through the high
desert, the thinnest thread of life fed by the slender silver artery of the Rio Grande. On either side of the fragile city, desiccated plains waited to suck the life out of it. The Sandias loomed above, ready to crush whatever might survive. I flipped the visor back up.
We parked and hiked up toward the petroglyphs. Didi led me to a sheltered spot. “This is my compound, my church. This is where I came every day. After.”
After her father died.
We squatted on the ancient volcanic rocks that marked the escarpment. Blue tail lizards skittered away through the snakeweed with their sulphur-yellow flowers. A desert millipede traced waves in the sand as it undulated past my feet. The black basaltic rocks, shadowed even in the bright sunlight, felt forlorn. Everywhere I looked petroglyphs thousands of years old had been scraped into the dark lava to reveal the lighter, tan rock beneath like chalk drawings on a blackboard. On the rocks just beneath us was a drawing of many tiny hands raised to the sky that made me think of HeartLanders when they were “receiving the Spirit.” Farther on was a petroglyph that depicted strange, extraterrestrial lines resembling those at Nazca. Another featured a bloom of happy, square faces like Teletubbies. Contemporary graffiti on a nearby rock had the Teletubbie heads committing pornographic acts. On the path around the rocks the powdery dirt was imprinted with treads from hundreds of pairs of running shoes, the squiggles, waffles, and starbursts as mysterious as any of the petroglyph designs.
The sun edged low enough to shine golden through the papery seed heads of the chamisa. A breeze scented with sage and moist from the first exhalation of a cool evening wafted by. In the distance, pylons marched across the open rangeland, a line of silver kachinas that went on until they were out of sight.
Didi stared off and seemed to be talking to the pylons more than to me, as if she were continuing a conversation she’d been having with them that I’d interrupted. “What I really loved about my father was that he liked me. He didn’t just love me, he really liked me. He got my jokes and I got his. Maybe I would have loved music without him, but he made sure that I loved it for the right reasons. That I knew it was a gift from the people who made it. I loved it that he never, ever said one negative thing about my mother even though she didn’t like him. I loved it that I could talk to him about anything.” She looked at me, the sunlight cutting into her eyes, glittering on the gold flecks there. “What about you? What did you love about your father?”
For one second, I didn’t want to say anything. Not out loud. But the words flowed forth on their own. “I loved how, in his heart, I was still a little girl. How he thought my favorite food was corn dogs because I liked them when I was five. I loved how he sang along with the radio, even though he had a horrible voice, just because it made him happy. I loved how he treated waitresses like queens and always gave bums money and called them sir and wished them luck. I loved how much joy he could get out of a corny joke. He could barely get to the punch line, he was always cracking up so much. The jokes were never any good, but it was funnier than anything to hear him try to tell one.”
The more I talked, the more important it became that I make one other person really understand who Daddy was. “We had this sort of like code phrase that we always used. ‘Now what was that about?’ He would whisper it to me or I would whisper it to him whenever something weird happened. It was the punch line to this really corny joke he told me when I was eight.”
“Tell me.”
“Now, it’s really stupid.”
“It was your father’s joke,” Didi said. She meant, it didn’t matter if it was a good joke or a bad joke, it was my father’s joke.
“Yeah, okay. So, the doorbell rings and a guy answers his front door and finds a snail on the porch. He picks up the snail and tosses it out into the yard.”
“And?”
“And two years later, the doorbell rings and the man answers the door and there is the same snail. And the snail says”—Didi helped me say the punch line—“ ‘Now, what was that about?’ ”
Halfway through the last line that Daddy had said to me or I had said to him so many times—when my mom was melting down, when I came home in a grumpy mood, when he started cursing and yelling at the TV set because the Cowboys had made a “bonehead” play, but mostly because my mom was melting down—I stopped dead. It was as if I’d awakened in the middle of a dream and discovered I was standing on the edge of a cliff that dropped off into infinity. That I was leaning out over the edge and could not step backward. That I was going to fall and never stop falling.
“He’s gone.”
Didi let me cry until a spot of powdery dirt between my knees had turned to mud, then she said, “Repeat this after me. ‘As long as I keep my father in my heart, he is with me.’ ”
I raised my head. My face was glazed with tears and snot.
“Say it,” Didi ordered. “Say, ‘As long as I keep my father in my heart, he is with me.’ ”
I bent my neck into my shoulder like a bird and scrubbed my face against my blouse until it was streaked with black from mascara. “As long as I keep my father in my heart, he is with me.”
“ ‘He will always be with me.’ ”
“He will always be with me.”
“ ‘No one can ever take him away.’ ”
“No one can ever take him away.”
“Okay, good,” she concluded, relieved. “Keep saying that because it’s true.”
She was right. Daddy was with me and he always would be. I nodded and my stomach, which had traded places with my heart when I peered over the edge of the cliff, settled back enough that I could breathe. Not a full breath but enough to keep living. The shadows grew longer and deeper. I was hugging my knees and shivering before I realized the sun was down, it had gotten dark, and I was cold.
“I’ve got your back. You know that, don’t you?” When I didn’t say anything, Didi put her hand on my shoulder and asked, “You do know that, right?”
I nodded. Didi Steinberg had my back.
Chapter Nine
At Didi’s house, Mrs. Steinberg quickly burned through the small savings Mr. Steinberg had left, then turned to eBay. She was using it to sell off all of Mr. Steinberg’s jazz albums and memorabilia.
Didi had taken to calling her mother Catwoman since Mrs. Steinberg now barely spoke, slept most of the day, worked on her eBay sales during the night, lapped all her nutrition out of a bowl, and never showed any outward signs of affection toward human beings. Catwoman had turned the living room into eBay Central with two computers going all the time, tracking the progress of whatever auctions she had under way. She had economy rolls of clear tape on big gun-type dispensers and stacks of sturdy boxes scrounged from the liquor store for shipping out items that had been sold. Teetering piles of old albums, autographed publicity stills, yellowed copies of DownBeat magazine, and odd things like cuff links and bar napkins, all carefully labeled and stuck in ziplock bags sat around waiting to be sold or shipped.
We were looking through Mr. Steinberg’s stuff one day a month after Daddy’s funeral when a loud chiming came from one of the computers.
“Hey, Catwoman made a sale,” Didi said, and went over to study the screen. “Shit! One thousand, two hundred and eighty-five dollars for a—” Didi read off the “Description of Item” that she had copied for her mother from the detailed labels Mr. Steinberg had affixed to the hundreds of archival sleeves he’d stored his jazz memorabilia in. “ ‘One 1941 cover of DownBeat magazine signed by Duke Ellington, two mint condition B&W, 8 Yen 10s signed by Billie Holiday, one 1944 photo signed by Dizzy Gillespie with Juan Tizol on valve trombone.’ ” As she read, the nimbus of manic energy that always surrounded Didi like a cloud of bees sagged. Finally, she sucked in a deep breath. “Wonder what he’d think if he knew that all the stuff he loved most in life was getting turned into frozen margaritas?” She attempted a laugh, then decided to scoop us out a couple in his honor.
We locked ourselves in Didi’s room and ate the margs out of bowls. Eve
n though Didi’s bedroom door was closed, we could still hear Mrs. Steinberg snoring in the next room. Didi rolled her eyes at the sound. “You know what we need?” she asked.
“What?”
“A lair!”
“A lair?”
“Yes, a lair! God, why didn’t I think of this before?”
She grabbed her marg and rushed out. I followed her into the garage where Mr. Steinberg had had his studio. We hadn’t been in it since he’d died. Mrs. Steinberg had cleared out most of his stuff. Didi stood at the door for a long time. What hit you first was Mr. Steinberg’s smell, how strong it was, how much it seemed as if he should still be there. Before I even really had a chance to miss him, though, I was missing Daddy.
“Don’t you fucking cry,” Didi warned me. The muscles in her jaw tightened and she stepped into the empty studio like someone was behind her jabbing her in the back with a bayonet. Acoustic tiles covered all the walls and several layers of carpet had been laid on the concrete floor to absorb noise so that the garage was not only soundproof but had a cozy, hobbity feel to it. The old turntables and microphones were gone. Probably sold on eBay. Mr. Steinberg’s battered headphones had been left lying on the floor. Didi picked them up and pressed them to her nose. When she turned around, she had the same expression on her face that I knew I’d had when I realized I was standing on the edge of a cliff, and if I fell, I would fall forever because there was no one to stop me. My face started squirming around. The tears she’d forbidden me to cry stung like vinegar under my skin.
Didi abruptly hurled the headphones down, stood in the middle of the old garage, and twirled around. “This is perfect! Can’t you see how perfect this is? Are you going to be a total goober and not see how perfect this is?” Her voice started off wobbly, but got stronger as she got mad at me. I was glad to hear it. I didn’t know what I would have done if Didi had started crying.
“We can be out here screaming our heads off and no one will ever know!” she yelled, twirling faster.