I wiped at the wetness around my eyes and then felt my pillow. No sleeping on that with its mixture of drool and tears. There were only night time tears left these days.
I wasn’t really ready to see M but I sure could have used one of those white-light visitation type dreams in which the recently departed tells their loved one everything is so beautiful and there’s a 24-hour cheesecake bar.
Hey, it’s my heaven. It can have a cheesecake bar.
I read once that someone with a terminal illness described death as being in a movie theater watching a movie they were enjoying and then someone coming up to them and escorting them out of the theater.
Another person said, we’re all just walking each other home.
I say God’s an alcoholic. He gives us brains that we only know how to use 5-6% of and then he gives us the freedom to choose. I don’t see how that could go wrong. Like inmates running the asylum. He should’ve thought that one through a little better.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks that. Some comedian once said in a TV show that God was capricious, mean-minded, and stupid. That tends to get people pissed off. You especially don’t want to get the Irish pissed off because they have a Blasphemy Law that lands you in hot water if you say anything about the creator. In a country where so many of us are more sure of the power of Starbucks than the presence of God, it’s hard to believe people would take it all that seriously. But I suppose there are countries that do worse than investigate you when you question their deity.
God and I are taking a break.
I don’t think he’s stupid. I just think he’s one of those tired older parents.The wild hellions bop around pillaging and then their gin-and-tonic-swilling parents half-heartedly say, “No, junior don’t,” in the weakest most mealy-mouthed tone possible. That’s God. He’s letting us have a run of the place and we’re not really good at self-discipline.
By ten in the morning I had my car packed and was on my second bottle of Mountain Dew, sweet sugary goodness. I spent more time picking out my tunes than I did my clothes. I’m thankful my car is still one of those oldies that has a tape deck and a CD player. I still haven’t gotten around to converting my college tapes into CDs or MP3s.
My first stop, I’ve decided, will be the “nostalgia store”, home to the best roadside kitsch this side of the Mississippi. M loved expensive things and would wrinkle her nose at my Moon Pie obsession. She would never have visited this glorified, dusty truck stop and that’s exactly why we had to go. It seems fitting to get nostalgic on the road to disappointment.
Groove Is in the Heat
It felt like 102 in that freshman dorm room. That was back before they thought we needed air conditioning. My kids think it wasn’t invented but they had it, they just didn’t think that kids whose parents were paying over $20,000 a year to send them to school needed it. And frankly, I didn’t know much about it. Air conditioning, not school. My parents never turned it on either, or I should say my dad didn’t. My mom left just about the time I started liking boys. No correlation of course, just rotten timing.
She left. I got my period. My dad, well, he was a lot like my neighbor Roger. When your high school sweetheart leaves, it’s much harder to pick up the pieces. Because my dad didn’t know where to find the pieces. But I don’t really want to talk about that.
Back in those early college days I danced on bars. Seriously. Those dorm room parties were so hot (and I mean that in the old-school version of hot as in temp. Not hot as in “hot.”). I felt the need to be at the parties because I was desperate to make friends in those early hours of my freshman year. I watched as besties were made and two days into my college experience I was still without one. I thought seriously about skipping every meal just to avoid the awkwardness of finding someone to sit next to in the cafeteria.
But she found me.
The next day, after the night at the drunkin’ sauna, she sat next to me on the wall in front of the student center. I was there doing what they called “facetime” before it was an app.
“You’re the girl who was dancing on the bar all night. How are you feeling?”
I looked up from my book pretending to just now notice her presence. “I’m sorry. What?” I asked not because I didn’t hear her the first time but because I wanted our conversation to last just a little while longer.
“You must’ve been really drunk. Dancing like that.”
“Nope.” I put my book into my bag.
“Come on. I’m not the morals police. Not gonna tell your mom or anything.”
I nodded and looked out on the quad. Not that my mom would’ve cared. She was probably out dancing on her own bar.
“And I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. I just…”
“You didn’t.”
The girl on the other side of me got up and I moved over slightly. M was sitting awfully close to me. Before someone else sat down on the other side, I made some room between us.
“Can you keep a secret?” I asked her.
“Of course. Besides I don’t know your name so who am I gonna tell?”
She was one of the people who already had friends so I knew there were plenty of people she could tell even if it was just a story that started with “Remember that drunk girl on the bar…”
“I was drinking grape soda last night and I was on the bar because people kept bumping into me when I was dancing on the ground. I didn’t even know their names and I felt like they were about to get to first base if I stayed there any longer.”
She laughed but I couldn’t tell if she was laughing at me or with me. Her laugh sounded like…
I can’t remember.
I remember how she said the word “Dude” or how we spoke with fake Russian accents that occasionally melted into something that sounded more like Columbian.
But as I think about this time on the wall in the first few minutes of our friendship, I can’t remember her laugh. Her full belly laugh. The one that’s uncontrollable. I can’t hear it now.
What’s the first thing you forget about when someone dies? Their face, their smell, their favorite things? For me, it was her laugh.
And I feel sick knowing I will never hear it again. And now I can’t even replay it in my mind.
Get out your phones and record your bestie laughing right now. Do it.
I hit fast forward on the first mixtape she made me for our first spring break. She went off to Cancun and I went home to Gloucester but we had tunes to unite our very different worlds. I thought about how she always named the collection after things going on in our lives or funny quotes people said.
This spring break tape was entitled “You used to wear pampers.” It was her way of putting down the cool kids when they got too into themselves. And according to her, they were all massively insecure. She pinky swore me to secrecy and would rattle off all sorts of inadequacies of her prep school and college acquaintances. M was in the inner circle of cool and monied but she always said she liked hanging out with me better. Years after she had lost touch with the Bitsys and Biffs (our nickname for the Fakey McFakersons), she still called me and I still felt chosen every time that phone rang.
My throat clenched knowing her “Walking on Broken Glass” ringtone would never come up again.
Feels Just Like I’m Walking on Broken Dreams
As the miles roll by...okay, if you’ve ever driven in New England, you know miles don’t really roll by. Nothing rolls by. For most of this area you’re stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. But since summer cape bound people were gone, and fall leafers hadn’t arrived yet, we had a moment’s peace and there was only light traffic.
Let’s pretend the weather was sunny, my windows were rolled down because I liked the breeze and not because my air conditioning went out the same time Mike left, and I was zipping along.
Anyway, I kept myself busy ticking off things she’ll never do again. The list makes me feel nauseous as I think about the possibility of never seeing my kids again. How wo
uld I feel if I was her? How would my kids feel? Would Maddie notice I was gone?
Very few people wake up knowing that this day may be their last. Mat Kearney said it best in one of his songs when he said we’re one phone call from our knees.
I didn’t drop to my knees when I learned of her death but at that moment it seemed impossible to die. With modern medicine, how does anyone die? I was sure someone could put her back together. I waited for Luke to tell me that the accident had landed her in the hospital but dead? Dead was impossible.
Dead happened to people on the news and in the movies. Dead in 2017 shouldn’t happen in an instant. It should happen with a family gathered around. Slowly. Kissing good-bye and taking mental snapshots or selfies, whatever the case may be.
But she was dead. I had the dust to prove it.
✽✽✽
271. Her flesh will never sting from a mosquito bite again.
272. She will never pay up on her bet to Henry about how old he would be when he had his first beer.
273. She will never pet the head of a dog just to have him lean against her and lick her in thanks.
274. She will never wipe dog slobber from her face again. She doesn’t have a face now.
✽✽✽
I pulled into the parking lot of what can only be described as dust-covered hoopla. Imagine a flea market of oddities collected over a carnie’s travels. Those oddities then reproduced with each other to create a Garden of Earthly Delights like a circus version of a Bosch painting. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you're half-way there.
What better way to start this crazy road trip?
Truth was I needed a break. I was feeling detached from my body. Sounds weird but it happens on road trips when you spend too much time in your head; when the afternoon sun makes you believe that you can willingly shuffle off your mortal coil with a quick intake of breath and a strain upwards.
And maybe you can.
The minute I stepped into the store, I was overwhelmed with a desire to want to trade my current life in for one that could involve owning this place firsthand. I could travel the world looking for odd junk, some pieces which may or may not have spells on them.
Like those metal banks. The clown one where you placed a coin on the clown’s dog’s back and it flipped it through the hoop and into the bag. This was someone's toy once. Probably their only toy. They probably worked all day to get one coin just to be able to watch that spring-loaded dog do his thing. Before TV. Before video games. Before apps that read to you or those that projected anime creatures in front of your eyes so you could hunt and trap creatures that didn’t even exist. Before that, people could be entertained by a dog and a coin.
The dog looked a little rabid because of the spots where the paint had flaked off. It was probably lead-based paint anyway. I wondered what would happen if I licked it. It would probably be nothing like the ‘shrooms M and I did in college.
I milled around the store examining all the pieces of other people’s lives that were for sale but it was the owner I wanted to see. He had the longest beard I had ever seen. It spilled off his upper lip and down his chin in the shape of Florida. I remembered stopping in here as a child and the place was still here, still the same. The store itself, a piece of nostalgia.
A lady came out of the back stockroom. What else could it be? A portal to another time period? Maybe this couple was traveling back in time and stealing metal banks, lunchboxes, and rotary telephones. She smiled at me but it wasn’t anything to make the road weary traveler feel welcome. It was the type of forced smile they teach you in your first day of customer service.
I picked up a wooden monk that looked like something someone’s grandfather would’ve carved.
“Bang its head.” she called from behind the counter.
“I’m sorry. What?”
“His head. Hit him on it. Not too hard. Kind of like the pressure you’d give a Family Feud buzzer.”
I had no idea the appropriate amount of pressure for a Family Feud buzzer or a monk’s head. But I tapped it, not hard.
Nothing happened.
“Here.” she came around the counter much quicker than I would’ve thought possible for her size and age.
She took it from me, placed it on the counter and gave the monk’s noggin a firm whack. Out of his mouth popped a teeny, tiny white object. That monk looked like he was smoking a joint.
“Pop him on the head again.” she ordered me.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what the monk would do next. But I was also pretty sure she wasn’t going to let me walk out of the store without seeing what this monk could do.
I “popped” him on the head and out puffed a white cloud. More like a little squirt of baby powder but it was still entertaining for anyone who had never seen a box project a moving picture.
She giggled and clapped her hands.
“Lift up his dress” she commanded.
I didn’t like where this was going but her steady gaze reduced me to a first grader in Sr. Mary Margaret’s class, the nun with the big ruler. Not that she would’ve ever had me lifting up a monk’s “dress.”
“I think it’s called a frock.” I said but I wasn’t sure. Frock seemed like the word you would use for a friar, not a monk, but what was the difference? Seemed like maybe Episcopalians wore frocks and Catholics, what did they wear? Habits? No. That was nuns. I thought about asking Google but thought it might be offended by my question.
“Dress, frock. What’s the difference? Lift it up.”
Again, I need to go on record, I did not like where this was going.
But I did as the lady directed me to. There where his legs should’ve been were cigarettes, real-sized ones for real people, not wooden monks. He was not a monk at all but a cigarette caddy. I nodded at her like one might’ve done at the end of a Western and left the store. I could hear her wet smoker’s cackle behind me. I wondered how many people she got to show that to a day.
My best dead friend smoked. I could’ve bought this for her if we were the kind who bought each other gifts...and if she wasn’t dead, riding shotgun next to a bag of Doritos in my car.
For holidays and birthdays, we took pictures of things we were going to buy for one another. It was a joke that came from college our junior year when she spent the summer at Berkeley and spent most of it high. She would send me pictures of things that made her laugh--pictures of signs that had words crossed out to change their meaning or graffiti that she felt solved the world’s problems. This was back in the day before you could text pictures. She had to actually take them and get them printed. Then mail them to me in an envelope and guestimate the postage.
She always thought the mailman owed her. She’d mail like 10-12 pictures in an envelope with a single stamp. She bragged all senior year that not one was ever returned to her. She thought it was because she met him every day at her door in Daisy Duke shorts and a cut off top and asked “Earl” how his day was going. She spent long hours over our stash convincing me that she was probably the only person on Earl’s route who actually spoke to him. Maybe she was.
But I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the only reason those picture letters never came back was because I was in Massachusetts paying all the postage fees due. Let her think it was because she engaged Earl in conversation. There were a lot of things I never told her. Guess she knows the truth now.
Do you think your tiny brain is flooded with information when you die? Well, not that you have a brain. But the spot where your brain was. Your conscious. Your you. Your soul. Your energy. Whatever you want to believe.
Do you think you finally get to find out who killed JonHenryet? And do you think you learn whether OJ Simpson was guilty? Or what about that tot mom? I guess we all already know that she’s guilty.
I gave up smoking the first time when I got pregnant with Maddie. I begged my dead best friend (alive at the time) to join me in giving up tobacco but she said cigarettes were her only committed relat
ionship and I wouldn’t want her to walk out on that now would I? Made sense at the time.
I wasn’t ready to get on the road yet but the store had started feeling like a tent the day after a Grateful Dead concert so I sat down on the cement car stop next to my car. It was awkwardly low but once my butt was hovering, I was committed. I plopped down the next few inches much harder than I should’ve. Getting up would take both hands and probably turning around on all fours and backing up. Mental note made not to do this anymore.
A crow landed in the spot next to me. It raised its beak in the air three times and cawed. I got up, walked to my car, opened the passenger-side door, squeezed the latch of the glove compartment and liberated my pack of Virginia Slims that had been incarcerated there since what seemed like the Reagan years but in reality was about the time Maddie started understanding what that “smoke smell was.” I quit cold turkey when she told her dad.
Funny how I just now remembered they were there after over a decade. I guess I should have known our marriage was doomed. I was willing to give up cigarettes for him but I always held on to them. Didn’t toss them. I didn’t fully commit to giving them up. I wanted to keep my options open even then.
Of course, it wasn’t really my cigarettes that ended us. It was his girlfriend. While I had been content to just ignore her, she couldn’t quite ignore me. After all, I got every Christmas, birthday, night, weekends...you get the picture. No “other” woman wants to stay the other woman.
But the funny thing is, once you cross over from the girlfriend to wife role, yours is the one in jeopardy. Mistresses never get that. If they wanted to truly stay with him, they should never desire anything more than occasional time together. But then again, what do I know about committed relationships? Every one of the ones I’ve tried has failed.
West of You Page 3