Early this year their father died, my uncle, my aunt’s husband, my mother’s brother, my grandmother’s son. It is important that he is understood in this way, how he was connected to all of us, because he had been the central bond. He had had a heart condition for years. Still, his death was unexpected. He was in his middle forties, slender, handsome like one of the singers my mother loved, Perry Como—a slimmer Frank Sinatra. He had given up salt and Cokes and this was supposed to have protected him. My aunt found him slumped over a stove that he was moving into his appliance store.
At one time he had wanted to be a pharmacist. Every man I knew who was his age, my father’s age, had wanted to be a doctor or a pharmacist. But they had all gone into business. My own father, who started his studies in pre-medicine, spends his life writing reports on the viscosity of nail polish, the solidity of brushes. The only ones who remembered these ambitions, who spoke of them often as if they were still alive, as if they formed part of the characters of the sons, were the grandmothers.
I thought of pharmacy when my mother called to tell me of my uncle’s death and I thought of my cousins as they had been when we were small children. This one’s an actress, my mother would say, this one a doctor. This one’s a poet, this one a composer, this one a politician, my Aunt Mary would counter. I asked how everyone was taking it and my mother told me that my aunt and my grandmother had both collapsed, but that they were doing better now. There are so many “I’s” in this that it will be difficult to believe that the real action is going on elsewhere, where I am not. I can imagine the slumping, the collapsing, the initial grief, but I cannot convey it clearly. I am afraid of flying, of the loss of control, it is possibly the thing that keeps me in one place for any period of time, but I flew home that afternoon. By the time I arrived, people had begun to pull themselves together, to behave as though they were calm. No one knew how to act as, here too, the real drama took place in the places where we are separate.
The funeral seems important in the history of my cousins and me. The funeral home was huge—subdued lighting, gleaming parquet floors. I had never seen such furniture, such carpeting and drapes. There were boxes with tissues sticking out like sails or pale limp hands, lying discreetly on marble-topped tables; hidden in odd corners, small private rooms for crying.
I can see my grandmother sitting on a pink velvet antique chair. She has chosen the lowest chair in the room and still her feet don’t touch the floor. There are no longer any stores in town that carry her shoe size, and she is wearing a larger size with cloth stuffed into the toes and her white legs are swinging, ever so slightly. The last time I saw my uncle, a year and a half ago, she was buttoning the top button of his winter coat, turning up his collar. She and my mother are both wearing navy blue. It is proper, my mother says, but not as dreary as black. She is a few inches taller than my grandmother. Some day her shoe size also will be extinct. They are both sitting there holding white gloves, with their hands folded over their purses. Before we left the house they had come into my room again and again, asking whether this necklace was too gaudy or these earrings were becoming. For lunch we had cantaloupe and cottage cheese, carefully garnished with parsley. My grandmother leans over to my mother and asks if she thinks the cantaloupe will set well on their stomachs. My mother says she’s sure it will and my grandmother sits back up, comforted. My aunt and my oldest cousin wear slacks, simple blouses, and when they first arrive the rest of us look overdressed, showy. Mary doesn’t own a dress, my grandmother whispers to me, a little too loudly.
We walk into the room where my uncle is lying in a mahogany casket. It is obvious from the way one cousin touches another’s arm or the arm of my aunt that they have bonded together, that when they turn they put on their calm looks, the looks reserved for strangers. I feel like an outsider. We begin to look at each other, briefly, then at the flowers, and we move to the back of the room, away from the body. We circle the walls, looking at the cards as if we are at a museum. How lovely, I say to my oldest cousin, these roses. And these, she says, these apricot glads. I look at her shoes, half a size larger than my mother’s, the same size as my own, and I wonder if the world will outgrow us also, as if everything contains some magical yeast, some incredible fermentation, and the women in my family are being left behind, and I almost say something like this to my cousin while looking at a brass goblet, some roses, some cut glass. The boy cousin leaves us, moves to sit in a chair near his father. He straightens his tie, is careful with the jacket of his suit. He will have nothing to do with our talk of flowers.
I see the room filling with people. Each of the family members is surrounded by satellites, friends, distant relatives. When friends come, we are animated. It is wearing, this talk, but we find ourselves interested; we are amazed at how some people are so young still, how some are so old. For long periods of time I forget that my uncle is there, my eyes never moving to the front of the room. I hear Aunt Mary laughing and watch her Indian wrestle with her daughter’s boyfriend. My words begin to come easily; I walk up, excited, to where the boy cousin is sitting, watching his father, but when I get there all I ask is the name of a flower, the waxy looking red bloom that is shaped like an ear. He shrugs, will keep his vigil, and I wonder why I did not say more.
Our grandmother, suddenly afraid that there might be something to religion and wanting him to be comfortable, her son, asks my aunt if we shouldn’t have a proper funeral. My aunt says no, a small gathering at the gravesite, maybe a psalm, and after that no dinner, no gathering. I overhear the middle cousin whispering to a friend. What is this called, what we’re doing? Is this a wake we are having? We have no names for tradition.
I see my middle cousin, her hair the color, the cut of Jean Harlow’s. I show her where there are Cokes downstairs. We sit on a sofa and I ask her where she’s going to go to college when she is through with high school, what she’ll do after that. She shakes her hair, stretches her long legs in front of her, says that she plans to go into music, that she hopes to write a Broadway musical, an opera, a symphony. She says that she will keep her father’s name, that she will never change it for any other man. She tells me that she changed the spelling of her first name two years ago, from a “y” on the end to an “e.” She says she noticed that I spelled it the wrong way on all the Christmas cards I sent the family, but that I can keep spelling it that way because she is changing it back to “y.” I feel absurdly angry at this. I want to tell her, of course, that I should have known, that it was the same thing her older sister had done at her age, the same thing I had done, that it was not, as she felt, original. I want to tell her that she may not have the strength for that, that her talent may not be as great as she suspects. And because I hesitate before I wish her success and because I find, when I do say it, that I do not at that moment mean it, I suddenly am convinced—even though for me the idea of sin has little substance—that what I am feeling is somehow, inexorably, sinful. My cousin leaves and I wonder if everyone becomes this confused at funerals, and I remember a cousin of my mother’s who, at the death of their grandmother, seemingly bothered less by the presence of death than by the realization that she was, herself, fully alive, left her husband and children and became legendarily promiscuous for a time.
Later, six or seven of my grandmother’s friends come in a group. They have been at a birthday party of the oldest one of their friends. They are all my grandmother’s height. They had walked together on the first day of grade school. They tell me these stories. The phone wires flame between them, every day, in different patterns. Each day they make a connection. Here I am surrounded by people who know each other well. Most of the people I have known keep friends for three or four years and then someone moves, or everyone moves. At first we write letters and then we stop. And if we run into each other a few years later, we are different people. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a friend for over sixty years, if I would begin to know what is the same about me from decade to decade, if I would have t
he depth that is necessary when you’re not always starting over. Two of my grandmother’s cousins are in the group. They have grown up together, gone the same ways, belong to the same clubs and women’s groups. One would not join without the others.
The time for visitation ends and two men in black suits clear the room of people and we are forced once again to stand by the casket. My aunt stands by her husband, looking like a girl, face flushed from the talk, excited. The muscles melt as one of the men from the funeral home puts a crank into the casket, waiting for us to take a last look at his handiwork before he lowers the lid, as nonchalant as if he’s offering us, please, one last chocolate. I remember that my uncle’s blood has been drained from him, that he has been denied even the comfort of his own blood, and I think of that same blood in all of us, bits of tubing cut and fastened, then unfastened.
He looks so pretty, my grandmother says, still holding onto my mother, he looks so peaceful. He’s dead, my aunt says, just dead and that’s all. Her shoulders slump forward. The man in the black suit begins to lower the lid slowly and we all huddle together, touch arms, bits of glass coming together finally in a pattern. On my arm I can feel the texture of skin through the soft blouses of my oldest and middle cousin and it feels like my skin. I feel my face and it is a cousin’s face; my mother’s voice is in my throat. And I think that there is no one I love more than this. Please God, let them be as great as they can be. Keep the old ones strong and the young ones strong, and when one goes, as this one, please God, let him live within us so that we are greater, not smaller, from his passing. Then cousins break forward, a last look. And then we all break apart, head for separate cars.
In the morning we watch two young boys in paint-splattered jeans and khaki jackets try to crank the casket into the vault. They have difficulty getting all four sides level and I think that if we weren’t there they might let it fall and be done with it. They get it down finally, with much banging and chipping of mahogany, and there is silence, a green wind, and I think that I can hear my cousins’ voices but am afraid that I am only hearing my own. And then my cousins and my aunt get into their car. My brother gets into his, Aunt Mary’s father into another. My mother and grandmother take me to the airport and they return to their homes.
At Christmas we all get together, but it’s built up again and we’ve lost the stimulus to break it down. We rush through dinner, gifts are sparse, several of us have the beginnings of a cold. We are dressed carelessly. Later we will all wash our hair to go out with friends. When it’s time to leave we feel relief. It is a scene we will repeat many times.
The Invention of Flight
I live in a town slowly turning into dust. Choked, finally, by the fields which surround it and by a larger town a few miles west which kept growing like a fat old man adding chocolate to chocolate who, one night in bed, rolled over and gently, quietly crushed his wife. The dust is from the houses rotting, the streets unpaved and rotting, pollen thick as fog, grain elevators pouring out the slick sweet dust of rotting corn until that time in the fall when the fields become white and brittle as bleached bones and the corn is cut close to the roots.
There are only a few stores left in town: one small grocery which doesn’t sell perishables, one store full of seed spilling out of bags, one store of dubious nature selling only bait and red cream soda and run by a man known as Cowboy with dust like black seeds in the creases in his neck, age cutting into his face, who dreams he is popular with the farmer’s daughters. They in turn dream of winning 4H ribbons at the state fair, of dances at the Legion where boys, farmers’ sons, dress in tight pants with silk shirts and sing rock and roll, hoping to be discovered and eventually see mythical places like California. Instead, always, marrying one of the girls when they’re sixteen, seventeen, moving into a house that someone has left vacant, buying one car that runs and one without wheels that they put in front of the house on cement blocks, for years keeping the dream alive that they will work on it, make it hot, take it to a drag race in Kentucky. For some reason there are refrigerators on all of their porches.
The county boasts two or three of the rarest denominations of churches, churches where the women never cut their hair and have it done up once a month in the most elaborate tall beehives, the back woven like a checkerboard, churches where the people believe that the walk on the moon was a hoax, something done with mirrors and special animation, that soap operas are more real than the news. A photographer from the capital drove through the town last year and took pictures, looking for quaint and not finding it but taking the pictures anyway, called it a village at peace with itself and in the article placed us in the wrong county and none of us corrected him. It also didn’t mention in the article that we are perhaps the closest town to where Wilbur Wright was born, that the air is filled with planes and we have no tourists. Often I feel that I am the only one in the town who remembers that Wilbur Wright began with a bicycle and he rose.
I own a home behind the Holiness church, have lived here for years but am planning on leaving. I’m waiting for the right time. I rent two rooms in the back of my house to two women—a mother and a daughter—and their rooms are stuck like barnacles on a house which is for the most part airy, white, uncluttered. The mother fills her room with Wilbur Wright memorabilia—photographs, clippings from magazines, chrome airplane mobiles, airplane ashtrays, airplane soapdishes, airplane models—in hopes of opening a small museum when the tourists find us, which she is sure will happen in her lifetime. On the wall is a reproduction of a clipping from a local newspaper at the time of Lincoln’s death: Lincoln! The Savior of a Race and Friend of All Mankind! Triumphs over death, and mounts victoriously upward with his old familiar tread! When I die, she often says, I want the news greeted with this kind of optimism.
The daughter, Melissa, has painted her room a dark moss green and keeps the blinds drawn so that it is barely possible to see the lace bedspread and flowered dust ruffles. A thirty-five-year-old virgin quite tied to her mother, her hair cut with less care than I take to cut the nails on my dog, shapeless faded dresses, she has rounded shoulders and her eyes are always to the ground or red with what, despite her silences, has to be caused by private dramatic bursts of weeping. Her room too is full of objects and, in fact, the only time that I have ever seen any of the feelings which are kept so completely below the surface is when she came out of her dark room one day and, watching to make sure no one saw her, placed a cupid from the vast collection of winged creatures which filled her room on a nightstand in her mother’s room and left, thinking her mother would never notice, as if it had flown there on its own. But her mother found it, ran her hands through her hair and across her large thighs, and huffed and said, Oh these cupids, I hate these cupids, these damn fat little angels, and picking it up, placed it inside Melissa’s door—not on a shelf but in the dust under the bed.
The mother sells Tupperware, Amway, Mary Kay Cosmetics, her afternoons spent in front of a television and most mornings and evenings spent with gray hair perfectly curled and sprayed, going from door to door and from one gathering of women to another, selling things on the home party plan, leading the obligatory word games to give the illusion of camaraderie before bringing out the collection of plastic boxes or creams. The mother is happy, content. She belongs to many clubs and is the one who always insists, at the formation of a new one, that bylaws should be the first order of business. She is, I believe, absolutely without any inner life and without any sensitivity to Melissa, cheerfully bringing up subjects which pain her—the state of Melissa’s appearance, the way the world is filled with evil. The mother is so happy and the daughter in such obvious misery that I am convinced the mother has in some way made Melissa the way that she is, that it is she who is completely responsible for what Melissa has become, as if she gave birth to her to absorb her spirit; I am certain there is no love between them.
I sit at the breakfast table with Melissa, trying to engage her in conversation. She smiles, nods, spills tea on her
bathrobe as she listens to me talk about the weather, movies, gardening, comfortable subjects.
“This town was once world famous for a type of rose,” I say. “They were used to cover the ceiling of the Hilton in New York when Prince Something-or-Other of England came to visit. The roses had buds as big as fists and stems as tall as a child. An adult woman could attach a rose to her waist and the stem would drag the ground.”
I am repeating a story I heard from an old woman who was probably lying, but it’s a good story and it seems to cheer her.
The mother comes into the kitchen holding an old ventriloquist’s dummy away from her body, says, “Look at this filthy, disgusting thing,” and puts it in the middle of the table. The dummy is unclothed and sexless, pinched in where the arms and legs meet the body and again at the knees and elbows. The body itself is cloth and stained badly, the head fitted with goggles, an aviator cap. “Found it at a yard sale,” she says. “It’s going to be Wilbur Wright.”
She pours herself some cereal and begins eating. Melissa looks away from the dummy, which is directly in front of her. The mother brings up the years she lived in Florida near Sarasota where circus freaks go to retire. She fills the kitchen with vivid descriptions of the odd people, the deformities that she saw, a 500-pound woman who lived next door to her whose yard was filled with broken clown equipment, tiny bicycles and masks and miniature cars, the mother never able to figure out why. When she begins to describe a dwarf she saw once in a drugstore, how he kept his freezer filled with squirrels, a delicacy, Melissa excuses herself, turns pale. She starts to leave the kitchen, turns at the door and asks me what happened to the roses. I say I heard they were some kind of hybrid and they reverted. They were the only roses known to have reached that size and no one could grow them now. Melissa holds onto the doorknob, turns herself around and leaves. The mother says, “When I was carrying that girl she turned every which direction, you wouldn’t believe. I’d say, ‘Get down, you son of a bitch,’ push her away from my ribs, give her little smacks. I thought she’d have more spunk. When she was born the doctor had to whack the hell out of her to get her to take in air.”
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