Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  “Nope,” he’d say with a banana-split grin, “I had to find that out on my wedding day.”

  There was no one else to ask, however, because by the time she had conceived an interest in her parents’ pre-Bernie lives Theresa was in a coma, her fever-thin body rubbed to nothing between taut hospital sheets. Bernie would sit beside her, holding the loose bunch of her finger bones and thinking of all the things she should have asked her mother: What the hell did you see in him? How did you know? What kind of pie?

  It was too late, though, and besides she knew most of the answers already. Razzle-dazzle and high derring-do. Lord, girl, how do you know anything?

  Cherry. It was cherry pie.

  “Why do trees shed their leaves?” her mother had asked once. Rhetoric was the lingua franca of the Tergusson household, but it seemed she had given the matter some thought. “Because they have nothing left to say,” she told Bernie.

  Like the trees she was a creature of few words, always shedding. Bernie had been shocked at how little Theresa had left behind, how lightly she’d stepped upon the earth. A couple of boxes of clothes and shoes, an old rosary, and a drawer crammed with Mother’s Day cards and birthday greetings that her daughter had sent her over the years, from the first bulky, macaroni art collages to the fulsome, pastel-coloured Hallmark cards with rice paper inserts that she’d purchased in later years, merely signing her name. Love, Bernie.

  Once or twice, she noticed, she’d even specified their bond, as in: Your daughter, Bernadette. But mostly Bernie took it on faith that Theresa would deduce their relationship as she had deduced so many things over the years, her daughter’s love among them.

  A week after Theresa’s death Tergusson had already run the clothes down to Goodwill and thrown away the cards. He claimed to have given the rosary to his pal, Milt, who was a fidgety sort of fellow and might benefit from Theresa’s string of worry beads. Her dad might have given them to Milt, although it was a long shot. One thing was certain: Tergusson would have done anything to get those voodoo beads out of the house. Bernie liked to think it was grief that had motivated her father, rather than impatience or the Reader’s Digest article he’d been reading on the can, urging him to simplify his life.

  “Yup,” Tergusson had said, “that’s about the size of it, kiddo.”

  “Well, I guess we all end up in a box out on the sidewalk one way or another,” he said.

  “Your mother was a self-contained woman,” he said. “Frugal.”

  She had died in the worst month of the year, the clocks losing their bearings, spinning backward, and the earth creaking on its iron-cold axis. They were spared the metaphoric chill of a winter funeral because, unbeknownst to her husband and daughter, Theresa Tergusson had set her heart on cremation. This last instruction had been issued, in the form of a request, to the priest of the local Catholic church that Theresa had ceased attending years ago.

  “Thoughtful,” was how Father Alvarez characterized this final petition from his errant parishioner. But Bernie discerned that he might have had other words in mind. Headstrong, surprisingly opinionated. Spunky.

  To Bernie, November had always seemed like a place rather than a time. Outside, the trees, having declared their frugal silences, having made their peace with needless chatter, shed their leaves. There were many ways to interpret the trees and their endlessly falling leaves — death, and gravity, and Ecclesiastes. The promise of renewal and nature’s cagey profusion.

  “Dead is dead, Riley,” Theresa had said.

  It seemed as if there were more leaves than there had ever been that year, and neither Riley nor Bernie was inclined to bag them. They covered the lawn in thick drifts of nothing more to say. In their profligacy they made a mockery of Theresa’s lean aphorisms, her skirt-tucking ways, her instinct for invisibility.

  However, Tergusson did not approve of cremation, an opinion he wanted duly noted before consigning his wife to the flames. It was unnatural, he told his daughter, ticking the reasons off on his fingers: it was perverse, it was final. It lacked ceremony, sociability, catering. Burning was for leaves, not bodies. Burning was for out-of-date tax forms and cherries jubilee.

  “Otherwise you got yourself a bang and a flash and a shitty little bonfire out back of some place called Dignity or Glory,” he explained. “Smoke pouring from the incinerator and nobody looking up. At the end of the day, they hand you a box of gravel and hit you up for an urn. What the hell do you do with the damn urn? Stick it on the mantel, stuff it in a cupboard? Best case, I guess, is you could set it up as a hood ornament.”

  Given her father’s sudden interest in hellfire, Bernie suspected that cremation made for uncomfortable associations. But it was what Theresa Tergusson had wanted — no memorial service, no music, no eulogy.

  “Spread the ashes somewhere,” she’d said. “Your choice.”

  If it sounded like an afterthought it was only self-deprecation, it was only modesty, it was only her mother’s housewifely impulse to excuse her own dust. In the end she had valued herself so lightly. (But what did it matter? Dead was dead.)

  “Spread the ashes,” she’d said out of a sense of formality. But she might as well have said throw away, discard, jettison. Dump the ashes, get on with your lives.

  The phone rang and Tergusson dived for it but it was a local call, no permits required.

  “Might see you tonight, then,” he said into the receiver, by which Bernie intuited that it was one of Tergusson’s buddies inquiring as to her father’s availability for Monday Night Football at the Legion Hall. Apparently Tergusson liked to keep his options open and his buddies guessing, although he’d never missed a Monday Night Football in, well, ever.

  “Yes, I have,” Tergusson said when she shared this insight with him. “Don’t you remember when your mother was dying?”

  Theresa Tergusson had been in a coma for two months before she died, which made eight Monday Night Footballs in all, seven of which, by Bernie’s reckoning, her father had not missed. Her mother had died on a Monday afternoon, the only inconsiderate thing she’d ever done. Tergusson had indeed foregone that evening’s sportscast, but he’d got his buddy, Second Floor Milt, to place a bet on the outcome of the Detroit Lions–Redskins game, the Lions narrowly winning their first game that season, squeaking through, and Tergusson, as a result, making out like a bandit.

  “I just had a lucky feeling,” he explained modestly.

  “We should all have such luck,” Milt would later marvel. Death was the inevitable outcome of the game of life, was his point, but the Lions hadn’t made the playoffs in two seasons.

  Bernie wanted to believe that her father’s shame over that ill-timed wager was what lurked between them like the shadow of a crazed serial killer in the kind of horror movies that played on all the channels before Halloween. Don’t go into the Radley house after dark, Scout! But her father was as photogenic as ever, by which she was forced to conclude that the condition of shamelessness that her mother had once observed, isolated, and diagnosed, still prevailed.

  Tergusson was flipping through the brochure from the Milford School of Continuing Education, a look of acute disgust on his face.

  “Have you given the matter any thought, Dad?” she asked because someone had to bring it up and the lake was about to freeze, would freeze by the end of the month. Her mother had loved the beach by Falcon Lake and Bernie had envisioned taking a boat out, just the two of them, herself and her dad. But that had been in summer. It wasn’t possible to sail a boat on the ice-sculpted chop of the half-frozen lake, and by now she just wanted to get it over with. The river was still running, so perhaps? The fact was her mother had been on her mind lately, never more so.

  “Get me out of my box, Bernadette,” she’d say.

  “I’ve never asked anything of you before,” she’d say. “I’ll never ask anything of you again.”

  “Remember me, rememb
er me, remember me,” she moaned day and night.

  Theresa Tergusson would have said none of those things, but that wasn’t the point. She hadn’t a shred of guile and had always disdained the easy contrivances of guilt. Besides, her mother was too pragmatic to purposefully haunt anyone. But there she was every night, in her flowered housedress and her comfy slippers, her large-knuckled, reddened hands held out before her. Bernie would wake with tears streaming down her cheeks although until then she hadn’t cried for her mother, her self-control the only unclaimed gift she could think to give her. There were so many tears they pooled in her ears, making her feel both tragic and undignified, a queasy combination.

  It was a year of firsts trailing their little kite strings of heartbreak and banality. She almost phoned Theresa on her birthday, and in the week before Mother’s Day found herself at the drugstore staring at a bank of glitter-bespattered cards before coming out of her daze with a pop. An actual if inaudible pop, like a cartoon character in the midst of a jerry-rigged epiphany. Apparently, Bernie’s inability to remember that her mother was dead was matched only by her father’s inability to remember that she had ever been alive.

  “Have you given the matter any thought?” she would ask from time to time, but her father never had. Never had or couldn’t bear to or wouldn’t say; by now it was all academic and Tergusson had never been one for book learning, which he pronounced “larnin,’” in mockery of the foolishness others thought they glimpsed in him. But if Tergusson was a fool at least he was nobody’s fool.

  Bernie wondered if she had been relying on her father’s willfulness for protection. Not from saying goodbye or the armpit-prickling self-consciousness that imagining such a leave-taking would engender. Not from grief or grief’s somatic blowback, her immune system wearing out like the frayed elastic on a pair of sweats, the “stress” psoriasis spreading its patchy shroud over her body.

  “Bye, bye, Mama,” she imagined herself whispering as she tipped the funerary urn into the flowing water, her mother’s gravel spreading out briefly before sinking like the dense flecks of bone and calcified memory that they were. Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie.

  No, what her father’s immunity protected Bernie from was her mother. Her mother’s body gathering dust somewhere in the house, in an urn, in a box, in a cupboard. When the funeral director had first handed her the cardboard box, she’d almost dropped it. It was surprisingly heavy, like a cake baked without a rising agent. Was the soul a sort of baking powder of the unleavened spirit?

  “Whoa!” her dad had said. “I’d better take that, kiddo.” He’d stashed the urn in Old Gal’s glove compartment, and on the short drive home she could hear her father straining not to crack the obvious jokes.

  “The old gal’s riding home Old Gal style,” he did not say.

  “Two old gals together at last for the first time,” he did not say.

  “What’s the difference between a heap of junk and a box of dust?” he certainly did not say.

  When Bernie was little her mother’s body and her own had been cunningly sewn together: Theresa was a kangaroo and Bernie was her pouch toy. Later she could stand apart from her mother for minutes and then hours at a time, but never too far apart. Her mother loomed so large in her life that often she couldn’t see her at all. At other times Theresa hove into view, a collection of maternal bits and pieces — hands that smoothed the hair off her daughter’s forehead or patted her back or rubbed her stomach, a neck into which Bernie could press her whole sobbing face. It was hard not to draw the conclusion that she’d been a mournful, sickly kid. Her mother’s neck smelled of everything to do with her — face powder and cigarette smoke and laundry detergent, Yardley lavender soap and the familiar warm biscuity odour of her skin beneath. When she was sad she smelled wintergreenish; when she was angry she gave off the whiff of electrical circuits burning dust.

  How did Bernie know this? Her mother was never angry.

  As she grew older, her mother’s body became a dangerous and separate creature. Her breasts, especially, were to be avoided. Bernie never outgrew the adolescent chagrin she felt toward Theresa’s body, a body that seemed to have nothing to do with her, with modest, seemly Theresa Tergusson, whose familiarity Bernie now experienced with contempt keen as love, a shame that rendered her stiff-armed and rigid-lipped in her mother’s presence.

  “Lord, Bernadette, what kind of a birthday hug is that?” Theresa would exclaim.

  When Theresa embarked upon the concentrated effort of her dying, Bernie became aware of her mother’s body in the hospital bed, awkward and unlovely. This dying body was and was not her mother. Perhaps it had always belonged to a woman so self-sufficient that she could afford to give herself away. To her husband and daughter, to every passing dog, to death. But it was difficult to exist in the conceptual crease where belonging folded itself into strangeness. She held her mother’s hand, wiped her face with a washcloth, bent to kiss her antiseptic cheek. Theresa was comatose by then, so who knew if it counted?

  But when she died, Bernie realized that her mother’s body, the body that she’d once loved and avoided and desired and hated and finally, in its last months, tended, this body had one last unsuspected property. It had the ability to be both gone and present, absent yet insistent. The trees had shed their leaves but surely there was still something left to say?

  “Nothing to do with me, kiddo,” her father said, a short-shrifter to the end.

  It seemed that Riley Tergusson’s everlasting gripes against death had not abated. Hypocrisy, sincerity, difficult decisions, needless expenses, he complained to his daughter, resuming his finger-ticking list: ill-dressed funeral directors, the odour of lilies, probate. Also religion — religion most of all. People dying when they owed him money. People dying after the football pools had been finalized, the March Madness brackets selected, or — worst of all — during the annual three-day Legion Darts Tournament. Such events never failed to rub him the wrong way. And the misuse of the word tragedy when all folks meant was sad infuriated him.

  Tergusson liked a surprise ending at the movies but took exception to plot twists in the narrative of his own life. He enjoyed attending the funerals of his buddies, the lying eulogies and homemade casseroles, but was distracted by the resentment he anticipated at being forced to miss his own funeral, which would be, he felt, something of a shindig. If he could he would have arranged to return, like Tom Sawyer, to spy on the mourners, taking notes on attendance.

  Death was a flimflam artist, an old con, he said. Death, per se, he added. And besides, there were too many bad songs about death and only one good one. Then he’d launch right into it, the one good song about death, the day the music died.

  Whether Tergusson approved or not, folks died and worms ate them or fire consumed them and that was the best you could hope for. It wasn’t like dialling a wrong number and ending up on the line with some joker who spun you a yarn. It wasn’t like winning the Moose Lottery only to find out that it had been cancelled again, pal. It wasn’t like signing up for a mortality course at the Milford School of Continuing Education because you’d left it too late and now you were cramming for finals. It wasn’t like any of those things, which was why Bernie asked her dad, once more, if he’d given the matter any thought.

  Riley Tergusson said he had indeed given the matter some thought, quite a bit of thought, actually. He’d been chasing the matter around, he said, head over tail.

  “Ever seen a dog with an itchy butthole?” he inquired by way of comparison. “Here’s the thing though — have you looked at the weather recently? Rivers are about to freeze, kiddo, lake’s already frozen.” To drive out to the beach he’d have to get his transmission fluid checked again, and ho-ly have you seen the state of the roads?

  It was November, one in a long line of them. By this time next year Bernie would be in love. She had tracked down the Somali refugee who had almost frozen to death in one of the
nunnery’s outbuildings. After all, she was the one who’d found him, just as her namesake had once discovered an apparition on a garbage dump near Lourdes. Saint Bernadette, patron saint of illness, poverty, and people ridiculed for their faith!

  His name was Afrax. His left leg had been amputated above the knee and he’d lost three fingers to frostbite. He told her he’d been lucky to find work as an interpreter at a refugee counselling centre but that his long hours didn’t allow him much time for his real passions. When she asked what they were he’d looked at her for a moment — a perfectly judged moment, she later realized — and confided that he enjoyed a good game of soccer when he wasn’t practicing the violin. He reminded her of someone but by the time she worked out who it was, it was too late. Too late to extricate herself from the fate of Afrax Dahir Galaid, who was brave and resourceful but who was possessed of a tragically comic vision that would beguile and exasperate Bernie for the rest of her life. If love was a lottery, a game of chance, how had she drawn the goddamn joker not once but twice? It was a mystery.

  After Tergusson had finished complaining about the state of the roads and the impossibility, the colossal stupidity, the death-defying feeble-mindedness of trying to drive out to the beach in this kind of weather, he paused for a moment.

  “What about we just keep your mother around for the winter?” he suggested. “Plenty of room in the house.”

  He gave his daughter the patented Tergusson double-wink that involved closing both eyes at the same time. And when he was done, he double-winked again — close squeeze grimace, close squeeze grimace — which could have been palsy or forgetfulness, Bernie reasoned, the impulse to waylay boredom or some fugitive reflex of the body’s picturesque decline into ruin. It made her a little sad, though, so she said, “Sure, Dad, we’ll talk about it in the spring.” She didn’t feel like another cup of coffee and the phone was ringing again so she collected her wet socks from the radiator and pulled on her boots.