Emily let out a small cry as Mudear's body popped out of the satin-lined casket onto the floor like an ice cube out of a frosty tray and came to rest right at the girls' laps.
They all sat or lay on the mortuary floor in silence. The girls were stunned. They sat quietly together on the funeral parlor floor as they had when they were girls and huddled close between their beads and talked. Only this time, Mudear was with them.
They looked down at their mother, stiff and straight as a little Popsicle. They didn't know what to do. They were afraid to move or cry out for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of the situation. But their dead mother was practically lying in their laps.
Finally, in the soft light of the Light and Shadow Memorial Chapel, Emily reached out and touched Mudear's hand stretched out grotesquely as if pointing to the enormous rip in Emily's new red stockings. She reached out and pulled down Mudear's dress hiked up to her thighs and began to weep softly.
For the first time in their lives since the change, they all looked Mudear directly in the face, and because she didn't insult them or shoo them off, they talked to her. They all spoke from the hurt in their hearts.
"Mudear," Emily began, "you shouldn't have told your own daughter that her face looked like a potato grater. That was wrong. Look, my face cleared up years ago. My skin's as pretty as yours, Mudear."
Annie Ruth, in the middle, sat up on her knees and spoke next.
"Was being free, like you always said, Mudear, was that the most important thing? Being free. Shit, what did that mean? Did it mean you were free to hurt us, your own children, to abandon us? To cut yourself off from the world and put the burden of your survival and ours, too, on us? If it hadn't been for us bringing you the world, you would'na had a life! And you didn't even appreciate it. Even though you were there, you might as well have thrown us away like so much trash. Even women who leave their babies in trash cans must think about them once in a while.
"Did you? Did you ever think of us?"
"No, I can answer that," Betty cut in, automatically backing up her sister. She sat right at Mudear's face. Annie Ruth looked at her in surprise. Annie Ruth felt seeing Mudear dead and stiff on the floor had changed Betty as it had touched her. "No. 'Cause, Mudear, the only person you ever thought of was yourself, the only person. And Mudear, that was wrong. God, that was so wrong. 'Cause you can't live in this world like that. Not and not crush everything you breathe on and touch and claim to love or give birth to.
"I remember how it was for you before, but did you have to go and be like him?"
Annie Ruth spoke again.
"Mudear, I don't give a fuck about your freedom. And I know that that don't matter to you 'cause we don't matter to you. But look at you now, Mudear, you dead and gone and free, I guess. But look at what you left us all here with. You left us here with all your garbage to tote around."
"Don't you have anything to say, Em-Em?" Betty reached across Annie Ruth and asked. Emily hadn't stopped weeping since she touched Mudear's stiff hand.
"I just always wanted a mama," Emily said softly and broke into sobs again.
Annie Ruth reached beside her and took both her sisters' clasped hands.
"I know you wish you could just reach up out of death and slap our faces, Mudear," Annie Ruth said. "Slap 'em the way you slapped Betty when she told you about Emily running off to get married. I can feel you wanting to slap me. To tell the truth, I wish you would, wish you could. 'Cause, God, Mudear, I don't want this to be the end. Can't it be better than this? I think it can."
At the memory of Mudear's hot handprint on her face, tears began to well up in Betty's eyes, too. When she had walked into the chapel and seen Annie Ruth leaning on Mudear's casket, she had thought it was the most sacrilegious thing she had ever seen. But now, with Mudear stretched out in front of them like one of those hard plastic life-sized colored dolls they sold when she was a girl, just a corpse like every other human that had to face death, the idea of Mudear didn't seem so sacred to Betty anymore. She-picked up where her sisters had left off.
"It was Annie Ruth's idea, Mudear. But we all came down here to tell you we gonna make it better than this. Starting right now, we came down here to tell you that we know we crazy, like all of Mulberry think the Lovejoys are. But now we gonna work on happy and peaceful and appreciative and joyful." Betty looked at Annie Ruth and smiled a bit. "After being with you for forty years, we got being a 'ranting, raving maniac' down pat. Now, we want to move on."
Annie Ruth smiled back and continued. "So, we gonna put you in the ground tomorrow, Mudear. And we're gonna try and bury a lot of pain and hurt and being mad with you.
"We probably won't be able to do it all at one time. We can't stop being the way we are overnight. But we gonna work on it. I'm gonna work real hard the next eight or so months 'cause, Mudear, I'm pregnant. I may not know who the father is, I may have to wait until it come out to see who it favors, and I may not even tell Delbert or any of them they could be the father. But I tell you one thing, Mudear. I sure as hell am gonna be a mother."
Then, at the thought of motherhood and the idea that her body was going to be swelling soon like Mudear's did with her three pregnancies, Annie Ruth began to cry, too.
"That's about all what we had to say, Mudear," Betty concluded, with tears rolling off her face. "We gonna put you in the ground tomorrow. I'm sorry for you that you won't have some good old friend stand and raise a prayer for you or one to raise a hymn for you. But you cut all those folks off just like you cut us off."
Betty tried to pull her sisters over into her arms, but she couldn't hold them tightly enough to ease the moaning and crying they had all fallen into. So, she reached down and pulled Mudear's body closer and nestled the dead woman's head in the soft silk of her royal blue skirt.
Then, their loud mourning took another step and their wails became keens, high-pitched and wounded sounding like animals. Their teardrops fell on Mudear's face, her breasts, her arms, her stomach, her thighs like the sprinkle of baptismal water, but it brought no healing relief for the girls.
"The Lovejoy women are having a hard time, huh?" Emily asked as all of them sat on the floor rocking each other with Mudear's stiff body lying across their laps, their faces streaked with makeup and tears.
Betty looked at Emily, then at all the Lovejoy women stretched out on the floor, and said, "Um-huh."
"Mudear, too?" Emily asked.
Betty looked down at Mudear's head and noticed for the first time nappy little balls of gray hair at the nape of her neck. The silvery pepper pods stood out in stark relief against the brown skin of her neck.
"Mudear, too, Em-Em," Betty replied.
And they all reached down to touch Mudear again: Betty her face, Annie Ruth her tight-looking breasts, Emily her bare legs and feet. Without consulting each other Betty began.
"Mudear, you remember that pink flowered bed jacket that disappeared a long time ago, your favorite bed jacket you swore someone snuck in the house and stole. I tore it up and burned it in the backyard."
Emily then took her turn.
"When I was nine or ten, Mudear, I used to pray that you would die so we would get a new mama."
Annie Ruth was last.
"When I first moved to L.A., I told people there that you already were dead."
They were silent again.
"She's so litde," Annie Ruth said to her sisters in surprise. "Damn, does a person have to die, have to be in a casket before you can really see what size they are?"
Betty reached over and tried to smooth down her mother's stiff hair. "She used to say, 'I'm not selfish. People just think that because I'm short.' I think it was something that she used to say when she was a girl, flirting, maybe. She didn't say it much after the change, though. I hadn't thought about it in years. She just stopped saying it."
Then, they were silent again. They thought and thought, but there didn't seem to be anything else to say.
Suddenly, they realized that they c
ould hear the faint sounds of organ music and for the first time since Mudear fell out of her coffin they thought to look around them.
There was a crowd at the door. Poppa stood at the front and looked at all the Lovejoy women sprawled on the floor of the chapel, their arms and legs and purse straps and high heels entangled.
Seeing them there together made tears come to his eyes. These girls always did belong to Mudear, he thought.
The girls looked up at their father dressed in his dark-blue Sunday suit as if they had been caught grave-robbing. He sort of raised his hand as if in greeting, then, he turned to go look for one of the Parkinson boys to help lift his wife's body back into her coffin.
But he had to practically fight his way down the hall. It seemed that half the town—the mourners from the two services across the hall, the staff of the mortuary, the florist from next door delivering arrangements, the organists, even one of the ministers who had just preached a funeral—was standing behind him trying to look over his shoulder for a peek at the Lovejoy women, together for the last time.
CHAPTER 33
I cannot believe how many people there are jammed into this little memorial room for my services this morning! There must be ninety-five, a hundred people in here. I'm not surprised at some of these folks here. Even though Carrie and I stopped speaking a year or so ago—now what did I say to her that made her so mad? I can't recall—I figured she'd be here. And the folks from Betty's shops, I expected. But look at Effie over there, the big heifer, sitting up there with her whole family. She never did like me. I think she's even fatter than she used to be. I'm in so much better shape than these big-assed, no-exercising women I used to know in East Mulberry. And look at Agnes. Good God, hasn't she got old and ugly. Now, who is that woman with the black and white polka-dot dress on? I don't think I recognize her.
Lord, people will come out when they think they gon' see a show. Bet they thought it was gonna be an open casket. They shoulda come yesterday if they really wanted to see something: my dead body dressed in this ugly navy blue dress sprawled out in the middle of the floor with my girls standing over me acting crazy.
My girls do look nice today, though, don't they? That's a beautiful black wool suit Emily has on even though she ought to know better than to be wearing slacks to a funeral. And that designer knit skirt is pulling mighty tight 'cross Annie Ruth's butt and stomach under that long georgette jacket. But they all look right nice. I always did like Betty in that black silk suit with the long wide skirt. And that cream-colored blouse with all those baby pearl buttons down the front is just the right touch.
Nobody can't say I didn't teach my girls how to dress. And how to carry themselves. Ain't got to say one time to any of 'em to pull up their chins and look to the stars today. Lots of women woulda been too ashamed after the way they behaved yesterday in this funeral home to show their faces around here.
I'm glad the girls or somebody had the good sense to take a pair of shears from the shed out back and cut some of my flowers to put around this place for my memorial services. That big vase of delphiniums is striking. I wonder which of the girls arranged it. But who let those funeral home floral arrangements in here? I hate those things. There's a broken wheel with white and yellow carnations. Corny. Must be from Carrie. And I guess they can't have a funeral without one or two of those bleeding hearts. Red and white carnations. Don't these florists know 'bout nothing but carnations? Well, there's a spray of white roses at least, but they don't have any scent. Uh, store-bought refrigerated roses. That bunch of poppies and larkspur and all kinds of wildflowers from the front of the house by itself put all these others to shame. Now, what's that one supposed to be? It looks like a sheet of lavender chrysanthemums edged in golden ones. What is it? A book? A closed book? A closed book? Is that supposed to be funny? Well, at least there's nothing that says "Rest in Peace." I wonder if they even use that anymore written on banners draped across a floral arrangement. "R. I. P." or "We Loved Her but Jesus Loved Her Better."
Look at Annie Ruth sitting there with her hand resting on her stomach.
Does she really think she or any of my girls are ever gonna be "free" of me? Especially now that she's gonna have a girl of her own?
Right, like I'm gonna let her bring up that child without me hovering over. Especially now that I got all eternity with nothing to do unless somebody hand me a garden fork or a remote control sometime soon.
Humph, those girls don't know me at all. Or themselves! Now they think they free women 'cause they think they got me told. Humph, getting mad is just the first step.
What's old Ernest getting up for? Don't tell me he gon' give my eulogy! He don't know nothing about public speaking. Hell, he don't know nothing 'bout me!
Well, that wasn't bad. "Esther Lovejoy's life spoke for itself." Well, that ain't bad at all. "Esther Lovejoy's life spoke for itself." And he had enough sense to get up, stand up tall, say his piece, and sit his butt back down.
Now, here come that little Parkinson boy. He think so much of the Lovejoy women, I better watch out he don't sneak his hand up in this casket. Oh, he has an announcement. "Will the family and mourners please proceed to the cars."
What? That's it? They're not gonna read something from the Bible? Like "Where your treasure is buried, so is your heart." Or "The humble shall be exalted when the exalted are humbled." Not even "Jesus wept"?
Ain't nobody gonna stand and sing a heartbreaking solo like "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"? No music?
Well, I guess it is more dignified this way. Actually, I kinda liked it.
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