by Lois Cahall
A burst of laughter entirely out of keeping with graveyard etiquette. And I find myself laughing too. “You’ve got a problem with whales?” she asks, as though coming back to this earth as a whale is funny but makes perfect sense. For some reason, this woman has just worked some magic. I feel compelled to say more. “You know, Alice, we did everything my mom and I. Except die. She did that without me.”
“No, she didn’t,” she snaps, all humor gone. “Somebody was there on the other side. She wasn’t alone.”
“I hope so. That’s a nice sentiment. It’s exactly what she used to say.”
Alice squeezes my arm for support before rising to stand. And then I find myself steadying my hand on her, too. “In the meantime,” says Alice, “we have a life to live. Self-cultivating. Like those pansies. Always growing and learning. Like you.” She looks me straight in the eye. “Your mother lives in here.” Alice places her fist onto my chest and taps. The same words my mother said. The same action. Now I am spooked.
“Well, I’d better go,” is all I can say, suddenly feeling at a loss for words.
Alice shakes her fingers at her pant legs to even out the wrinkles.
I look around but don’t see another car. And then on impulse, “May I offer you a lift home?”
“Oh no. I use this time to walk.”
Good, I think to myself. I was just being polite anyway. And I don’t really want to stand here any longer figuring out what I actually feel about this odd woman.
“Walk the two miles every day. Keeps my ticker in shape,” she says self-righteously.
“Oh?” I say.
“It’s my daily meditation for the thing I look forward to most. My daughter’s grave.”
That’s a ridiculous explanation, if I’ve ever heard one. “Okay, then, nice to meet you again, Alice. And I’m so sorry about Joy.” But Alice only nods. And with that, I head for my parked car just off the dirt road. I try damn hard not to glance back. But I can feel her watching me, studying my every move.
Moments later I’m safely in my seat, turn the ignition over and begin to drive away. In my rearview mirror I glance back at Alice waving goodbye a little too effusively with her hole-digger. “Self-cultivation? Hmm….” I think to myself. Maybe she meant self-preservation. Oh, who knows… who cares? My mom is dead and nothing can change that. I head up the hill pressing harder on the gas pedal.
Chapter Two
1960
My mom, Rosie knew little of the world beyond her own mother who was a seamstress by day and a complete annoyance by night. Rosie’s parents were Armenian immigrants off the boat so they had no understanding of all the modern conveniences an American girl might long for when she was cooking in the kitchen. Like an electric can opener. Her father, my grandfather, repaired clocks. All kinds of clocks, but mainly big cuckoo clocks you’d find in some grand old foyer of a Victorian home.
Rosie’s best friend was a violin, though at age seventeen she was ready to move on to a friend that might actually breathe. She had come to despise the melodramatic squeak of the bow across the strings, longing instead for laughter and sleepovers. Though Rosie’s mother vetoed that, saying to her daughter, “You can never have a sleepover because boys will sneak in.”
So one Saturday morning, Rosie slammed the violin down on the card table and just plain quit. And there was nothing anybody could say about it. So this is what it felt like to rebel: powerful.
Father Zakarian’s Friday Armenian lessons went next. Then, the ill-fitting smock that covered her knees at church, until church succumbed, too. The final childhood rebellion led her across the boundary of her driveway to the promised land… the street corner two blocks away.
“Roselyn Marie!” her mother would scream over the hum of her sewing machine, “Don’t you leave this house without a girdle! You hear me?”
Her mother waddled to the front door, but Rosie was already blowing through the white sheets on the neighbors’ clothesline and cutting through the garden trellis to the safety of the sidewalk. Here she could stop, roll the hem of her dress up to miniskirt length, pull her shoulders back to stick out her breasts and parade past the pizza parlor on the corner where Bernie, the older man soliciting town councilman votes had installed himself. He already had Rosie’s vote, and he was about to have something else, too…
Six months later, Rosie’s sleek figure went from strutting her stuff to strutting her duck-waddling pregnancy. After spending the first three months with her head hung over a toilet bowl from morning sickness, Rosie gave up trying to conceal her secret. Soon everybody from the postman to the butcher knew. In fact, the only person who didn’t seem to know was standing next to newly elected councilor Bernie on the town hall podium. Mrs. Bernie. His wife.
But I was not alone. I had my grandmother and a collection of babushka-wearing aunts streaming in from an Armenian mountainside, all happy to pace the hospital hallways as Uncle Zaven handed out pink-ribbon cigars.
And at precisely 8:02 p.m. weighing in at the same numbers—8 pounds 2 ounces on August 14, I, Marla, was born. The day Mom brought me home, even Grandma stopped the pedal of her sewing machine to rise up and examine me, all wrapped up in a pink bunny blanket.
My mother named me Marla because it sounded like the most luxurious item my grandmother had ever possessed: a jar of marmalade.
I may have been illegitimate, but I was wanted in every way a child could be wanted.
While in a nearby town, in another family, Alice’s child Joy, was unwanted…
Alice, as she was to tell me, was the only redhead in a family of Black Irish, from a big brood outside of Boston. The only thing that Alice and my mom, Rosie, had in common was that they both had babies in the year 1960. Alice was the awkward middle child, number six in a line of ten kids. When she was eighteen, her parents—a schoolteacher and a butcher—were anxious to have her marry the young rookie cop from up the street. The sooner she said “I do” the sooner there would be more corned beef and cabbage for the rest of the poor family. Alice and the cop were married in a small civil wedding on the icy steps of the town hall with Alice’s two siblings as witnesses. The next day, with a borrowed dump truck and a few pieces of used furniture, they rented the top floor of a duplex just one picket fence-yard away from her parents.
Alice had two dreams. One was to own a florist shop. This she imagined with one hand flicking through the pages of House and Garden and the other burping her baby son on her shoulder. The other dream was taking the newly hyped birth control pill that her not-so-Catholic friends were raving about. But Alice was a good Catholic girl who didn’t particularly fancy burning in hell, so just like Rosie, she too, spent her mornings hanging over the toilet bowl. And in 1960, Alice was pregnant with her fifth child in little over seven years.
Alice’s two-bedroom duplex was already bursting with four sons, one collie and two black cats. “But we can’t afford another kid!” was all her husband could say as he admired his reflection in the mirror, belted in his handcuffs and placed his gun in its holster.
Dodging the pull toys and missing puzzle pieces strewn on the living-room floor, Alice stormed from the hallway into her cluttered room, slammed the door and flopped on the bed in tears.
The only way to escape the chaos of kids, and that stack of unpaid bills sitting next to the wall phone, was to take a cleaning job for a wealthy woman in a Tudor mansion on Belmont Hill. There she found peace in the motion of her dust cloth swirling over a fresh mist of lemon furniture polish as it glided across the mahogany dining room table.
Alice was allowed to sip a cup of Lipton tea on the veranda during her lunch break. She would spy on the gardener working his magic around the kidney-shaped pool, watch him stand back to admire his work before planting a row of red and white impatience, preparing for a pop of summer color. This is how Alice learned.
On Tuesday and Saturday evenings, she covered after-hours duty at the Laundromat, mopping the floors, and taking great care to see that every drier’s lint screen wa
s fuzzy-free. When the clock hit midnight, she collapsed into a plastic chair bolted to the wall next to the detergent dispenser. She elevated her swollen ankles while fingering through the coffee-stained pages of a Boston Globe left on the folding table next to somebody’s left-behind wool sock. There was comfort in propping up the news on her swollen belly, comfort in the deep rumble of the last load of clothes in the nearby dryer.
The night Alice’s water broke, her husband was in the middle of a breaking-and-entering arrest down at Paulie’s Pizzeria and couldn’t be at the hospital. Neither could Alice’s mother, babysitting Alice’s four other kids. So on that rainy night, when Alice pushed her fifth child into this world, she decided that if it were a girl, no matter how alone she felt, if nothing else, her daughter was going to get a joyful name.
And she did. Eight pounds and nine ounces of bouncing baby “Joy” was born.
Chapter Three
R. I. P.
Helplessness & Denial
It was the third Friday of the third week in March that I got to thinking: “The month of March—it comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb…” just like my mom, Rosie, used to say when the wind whipped outside our window, while we sipped hot cocoa on the inside, watching Jerry Lewis on the Movie Loft. Cinderfella was my favorite. Mom would iron, Grandma would fold, and I’d stretch my tongue as long as it could go, licking the marshmallow from the tip of my nose timed to the laugh track of the movie.
I snap back to reality. To denial. To feeling helpless. What I’d give for just five minutes to do that again. Mom was right. Today is 65 degrees, truly a ‘lamb’ day. And I’m feeling like a lost one.
My hand-held hoe hangs idly from my fingers as I stand over the damp soil from last night’s rain. What shall I plant? The sun struggles through the folds of an overcast sky. April is only a week away, though I feel I ought to plant my mother’s flowers on her grave now, since everything else on the list has been done. Obituary written: check. Black dress bought: check. Casket: check. Wake, funeral: double check. Stop by cemetery every week and linger: check. But a desire, a desperate longing to do something more… the box is unchecked.
Not much left to tend to aside from this two-by-four-foot patch of soil around her grave. Wonder how she’d feel about a nice hydrangea? Though she was more a yellow rose kind of gal. Wonder if she’s even noticed the little stone whale I put in the muddy soil? Wonder if the cemetery caretaker would let me plant a couple cherry trees around the outskirts of her stone? Maybe put in a bench for people to sit and meditate?
“You don’t happen to have a watering can in your trunk, do you?” a voice hollers.
It’s Alice. I should have known. Four rows over at her daughter Joy’s grave, waving at me, all smiles, like a clown with her cropped red hair. Reluctantly I wave back. Man, I think to myself, that woman needs to get a life. If it just rained last night, what the hell does she need a watering can for, anyway?
“Oh, hello, Alice,” I say. “No, I don’t have a watering can. Sorry.”
I pretend to busy myself, move the dirt around between my fingers. Anything so Alice will think I’m occupied. I mean, look, I can’t help but feel sorry for her, but still, this isn’t about her and her daughter. It’s about me and my mother.
Since I didn’t have a father or siblings, my mom was everything. I was an only child, used to being loved, heard, and cared for, exclusively and unconditionally. Now that unconditional love was gone forever.
There’s a shadow standing over my left shoulder. God, this woman doesn’t know when to quit.
“Why do you suppose people write ‘Beloved Wife, Mother and Grandmother’ on the person’s stone?” asks Alice.
I don’t know, why don’t you ask them? I think to myself.
“I mean, what if that woman wanted to be remembered for her opera singing or her painting skills?” explains Alice. “Maybe she wanted to be an individual. Not somebody’s beloved mother.”
“I suppose…” I say, still refusing to engage her and busying myself with nothing.
“Know what is the stupidest thing people say at funerals?”
“Ummm…. She’s in a better place?” I say sarcastically, digging harder.
“Exactly. She’s in a better place. Well, how the fuck do they know?”
I’m snicker, startled by her outburst. Okay, I might not like her, but this woman is funny.
“Pardon my French. I’m fluent,” she says, and then bows.
“I was just thinking,” I say, unconsciously tapping the ground next to me.
“Oh yeah?” says Alice, sitting down without a second thought.
I’m surprised to find I don’t mind. Her words have suddenly made my self-pity dissipate. For the moment, anyway.
“When people ‘she’s in a better place’, at funerals, I want to say ‘she’s in a better place, huh? Well, then maybe your mother should die tomorrow so she can be in a better place, too,” I say. “If heaven is an eternity, couldn’t it have just waited ten or twenty years more?”
“People are always amazed when they see how strong we are at the wake or how in control we look at the funeral,” says Alice. “The big secret—that you and I and anyone who has ever lost anyone share—is that the funeral is your last moment to do something right for them. Like you, Marla. I bet right now, right this very minute, you’re wondering what you can do for your mother now that everything else is done.”
She’s figured me out, I admit to myself, not entirely pleased at the realization.
“Oh and I like the whale ornament,” Alice adds, tapping the top of its spout. “Can you make it spit water?”
“Would have to leave a hose hooked up to its spout,” I say, pointing my hand digger at the nearby community water spigot with the rusted iron handle. “But, thanks for noticing. Got it at the garden center.” I say. And I launch into full-speed thoughts: “You know, Alice, the guilt is a killer. Especially when it could have been avoided.”
“You mean the ‘Maybe if I was there. Maybe if I could’ve, would’ve, or should’ve, she’d still be here?’”
“Exactly.”
Alice looks away, face into the wind. Abruptly, she changes her tune. “Hey, what do you mean ‘alone’? Haven’t you any siblings?”
“No, only child, remember. And apparently that makes me an orphan.”
“No father either?”
“Never knew him.”
“No children of your own?”
“Not yet. I’m not sure I ever will want them. I don’t want a life controlled by the needs of others.”
“Hmmm. That’s a bold statement,” says Alice. She seems to be hit hard by my words.
“Although with a dead mother, I feel like my life is controlled by an outside force anyway.” She looks at me as if I’ve more to say. And I have. “Like when I make arrangements to meet somebody for the first time—even yesterday when I had to meet this guy in the bank about a loan—I want to say, ‘I’ll be the attractive one with long brown hair who just lost her mother.’ Or when I run into somebody at the drycleaners and they say, ‘How are you today?’ What am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, I’m crappy. My mom just died.’ It’s as if her death is a part of me, some extended limb, an attachment I can’t get rid of. Don’t even want to get rid of. There’s before mom’s death and after: the line that divides the Marla that I was and the Marla that I am now.”
“Do you ever talk to heaven?” Direct as ever.
“All the time,” I say. “But nobody answers.”
“She will. When the time is right.”
“Sure. I hear all these stories about how a loved one will find peace in the hereafter and talk to the living in our dreams when we sleep, to tell us they’re okay. Well, what’s she waiting for?”
“Maybe she’s—”
“Mom was always singing. She‘d sing this old Fred Astaire song and do a silly tap dance around our kitchen floor. You know the one. It’s famous: ‘Heaven, I’m in heaven, and my heart beats so that
I can hardly speak…’ Well shit, Alice, I hope it’s like that. I hope she’s dancing on a cloud. She was the happiest person I know—but so afraid of death. And to die the way she did…” I muster up the courage to add, “It should have been me.” And now I glance to heaven.
“Don’t say that. I lost a child. There’s nothing worse. She’d have wanted it to be her. I wish it had been me instead of Joy.”
Here come the tears. I should have taken out stock in Kleenex. I reach for my pocket to find a crunched-up tissue.
“Look, when you’re ready to tell me, I’m all ears,” says Alice.
“Maybe we fear what we don’t know? What’s on the other side,” I say, changing the subject.
“Maybe we’re more afraid of the choices and decisions we have to make now while we’re alive.”
“Maybe…” I gather my shovel and garden gloves and rise up. It’s time to make my way to the car. “Looks like the clouds are moving in. Wanna ride?”
“No, I’m fine. Gonna stay a while longer.”
“Okay, then.”
“See you next Friday? Same time, same place?” says Alice.
I’m reluctant to commit but then suddenly find myself spinning around. “Hey, Alice?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for today. The things you said, I mean. Sometimes I feel like nobody understands what it’s like. You’re the first person I can talk to who seems to just…” and after searching for a better word, I say, “gets it.”
“Maybe we can help each other to get it. You with a lost mother, me with a lost daughter.”
“Maybe. Next week, then?”
“You betcha,” says Alice, giving me a thumbs-up through her muddy garden glove.
“And Alice?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m truly sorry about Joy.”
“I know.”
And then it’s as if our minds synchronize.
“But she’s in a better place!” we say together.
She shakes her head and I smile for the first time in weeks.