What We All Want

by Michelle Berry

  “Why are you crying?” Tess says. “You’re not the one who has

  to diet.”

  “Exercise too, Mom,” Sue says. “Maybe we could do aerobics together. I’ve got some great videos.”

  “But the baby. You shouldn’t be exercising.”

  “Exercise is good for the baby. God, Dad, stop bawling. Pull yourself together. I’m going to get some water to drink and I want you two to smarten up by the time I get back.” Sue stomps out of the room.

  “What’s wrong, Billy?”

  Billy sniffles. “I don’t know. I just can’t stop.”

  Tess reaches for Billy’s hand. She takes it. She squeezes hard. They sit together on the bed, Tess staring out the window, Billy sobbing. Finally Sue comes back into the room and takes her father home.

  Dick walks Hilary to the front of the grocery store near the funeral home.

  “I’ll call you later, if that’s okay,” he says. “Have fun shopping.”

  “Yes,” Hilary says. “We need groceries.” She feels headachy and stiff from sitting up all night in Dick’s arms, staring at the TV set. She didn’t want to move for fear of waking him. She didn’t want to wake him because she felt warm and protected and strong. Because she thought he might make her go home. She didn’t want to go home last night because she wanted to be near her mother. Sitting in Dick’s arms she was there, right there, upstairs from her mother. Close to her.

  Dick woke up startled when he saw Hilary sitting beside him. His eyes quickly focused and he remembered suddenly where he was. He made Hilary coffee, he made her breakfast. They talked politely about the weather. And then Hilary reached up to him as he was standing next to the sink doing breakfast dishes, and she pulled his head down to her level and she kissed him on the lips. Hard. Ever since that kiss Dick has been animated and excited. Happy and nervous. Hilary feels the same way she did before the kiss.

  “I’ll be working on your mother this evening, getting her presentable. Making her beautiful again. I’ll be thinking of you. When can I see you again?” Dick wants to hold this tiny woman in his arms and not let her go. He knows she’s a little eccentric but he’s decided that doesn’t matter. He likes her just the way she is. He woke to her soft hair on his shoulder this morning.

  Hilary says, “You’ll come to the burial, won’t you? You’ll help?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  Hilary watches him walk down the street and then she ducks over to the side of the store and waits until he is gone, until he turns the corner. Then she walks down the street towards the funeral home. Follows in his footsteps.

  It is early afternoon and Hilary sits in the park across from the funeral home. She waits and waits and waits. She is cold. The lights in the funeral home grow brighter as the sun begins to set, the sign illuminates, glows: MORTIMER’S FUNERAL HOME. At one point Hilary sees Dick leave the funeral home and go up to his apartment. Then, after an hour, she sees him come out of his apartment and walk down the stairs back to the funeral home. Dick stops and looks around, as if he knows he is being watched. He scratches his chin. Then he enters the funeral home and Hilary sees a light glow from the hallway window, the stairwell window, and then the basement. In the park Hilary hides behind a tree. A car passes on the street and a light rain begins to fall. Dewy almost. A touch of cool moisture.

  Hilary crosses the street and hides in the bushes beside the funeral home. The street is deserted in the early evening rain. She watches the basement windows and then she moves over towards a lit one and crouches, still in her red dress, a heavy coat covering it, she hides in the greenery. The windows are mottled but Hilary finds one that has a crack in it, a sliver pulled out of it, and she leans down and presses her eye close. She is shivering in the damp cold.

  Dick is washing his hands at a sink. He is looking carefully at his fingers, searching them, as if he feels they aren’t his. He pulls on latex gloves. He snaps them, but Hilary cannot hear the sound. The room is sterile and clean. A silver table in the middle. A wall of drawers and glass cases. Instruments. Embalming machines. Dick sets up a smaller table by the large one with bottles, jars, pencils, a hairbrush, lipstick. A white-blonde wig rests on a Styrofoam head.

  Dick places a picture of Rebecca Mount on a clipboard beside him. He studies it. It is of Rebecca standing in the backyard when she was much younger, her hair blown a little in the wind, her arms folded in front of her, a cigarette in one hand. She is laughing. There is the shadow of Hilary falling just to the right of Rebecca, elbows cocked out to hold the camera, looking as if she is trying to fly away. A bird woman suspended in the darkness of a shadow.

  Dick walks out of view. He comes back rolling a table and on this table is a body draped in a sheet. Hilary holds her breath. She closes her eyes. When she opens them her mother’s body lies there before her.

  Dick lifts up Rebecca’s chin and studies her neck. Hilary holds her breath. There are marks on Rebecca’s neck, bruises, purpley-brownish marks. Dick puts her chin down again. He stands there, thinking.

  Hilary is suddenly above her body. She sees herself down there, looking into the window, watching what is happening to her mother’s body, the rain picking up and soaking her hair, the tears moving down her face as if her eyes are leaking out her soul. She can see her mother but she feels like she is watching a stranger, that that isn’t her mother, that can’t possibly be her mother.

  Dick takes a small bottle of spray and squeezes it up Hilary’s mother’s nose.

  Hilary settles down on her calves. She rests her small bum on her shoes, she leans into the windowsill. It’s like watching TV, she thinks. She scratches her cheeks.

  Dick begins with the makeup. He coats Rebecca’s face in whites and then beiges and then pinks He does her shoulders and the scoop of her neck. He paints her hands. He paints thick over the marks and a sewn-up line on her right clavicle. Then he applies eyeshadow and bright red lipstick. He tweezes her eyebrows and combs them up in a surprised fashion. He brushes on a touch of mascara and places earrings in the holes in her ears. He fiddles with the wig for a bit, looking back and forth at the picture before him. Then he cuts her fingernails, polishes them, a dusty rose colour. Dick works quickly and sensibly, carefully. He doesn’t pause or look as if he’s thinking about anything in the world except what he is doing. It’s as if he were working on a mannequin, something plastic.

  Hilary thinks her mother might just jump off that table and stand up and smile.

  Dick pulls on Hilary’s mother’s underwear, bra, nylons, and purple dress. It is awkward, his face is red, straining. He is sweating, wiping at his forehead with a paper towel. Hilary holds her breath. Dick moves towards Rebecca to adjust some makeup on her face and then he stands back again and looks at the picture before him and then at Rebecca Mount.

  He smiles.

  He slips off his gloves. He stretches tall. He yawns and looks at his watch and then writes something in a notebook beside him.

  And then Dick leaves Rebecca Mount waiting and walks out of view, down the hallway of the funeral home to the casket and supply room. He wheels out a Blue Diamond casket—the carbon steel with shaded, brushed finish; the light blue regal velvet interior with swing-bar hardware. A mere three thousand dollars. Not quite top of the line, but not the lowest of the bunch either. And even though he knows Thomas should be able to afford it, he won’t charge anything. He wants to do this for Hilary, give something to her. He pushes it ahead of him quickly, whistling under his breath. Dick opens the lids and blows on the pillow, making sure it is dust-free, and then he struggles with Rebecca Mount a bit until she is lying in the casket. He adjusts her arms and legs and torso and neck and head. He uses props to make her look comfortable—a headrest, an arm-and-hand positioner, and a repose block for the shoulders. He straightens her dress. He touches her wig a bit, brushes it, smoothes it down where it got all mussed up, and then he shuts the bottom half of the Blue Diamond casket and stands back for a third time. Dick closes his eyes
and then opens them. He pretends he is seeing this body for the first time.

  Perfect.

  Lovely.

  But Hilary is not there to see this. She is walking, head down, in the rain, towards home.

  She is wondering about her father and where he might be right now. She wonders if he is still alive and she hopes he is dead, dead, dead. And then she thinks about Dick and what he does every day, about what he faces, and how that makes him special.

  Death. She is thinking about death.

  That heart-and-breath-and-movement-stopping fear of death. Her mother is there now, dead. Hilary is still living. She is walking in the cold towards home. The street lights shine around her but she feels like she’s walking in the dark.

  When Hilary enters into the house she is surprised by the sound of the TV, by the warmth of the furnace, by the movements of life around her. Thomas is sitting on the couch with Jonathan.

  “Where have you been?” Thomas looks at his sister. “We were worried sick about you. And look—your face is bleeding again.”

  “Out,” Hilary says. She wipes the small line of blood from a scratch with a Kleenex she finds in her pocket.

  “You’re wet,” Jonathan says.

  “Out all night? All day? Twenty-four hours?”

  Hilary shrugs. She tiptoes across her rocks and sits in the armchair beside the TV. She looks at Thomas and Jonathan.

  “You should dry yourself or you’ll catch cold. Here, take your coat off.”

  “I was out with Dick.”

  “How did it go?” Jonathan asks “It must have been a good date if you’re just getting home now” He smiles.

  “Did you know Tess is in the hospital?” Thomas says. “Why?”

  “Heart attack.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine now. I just went and visited. Billy’s all shook up.”

  Hilary looks closely at Thomas and Jonathan. There is something about them, about the way they are sitting, so close together, on the couch. She scratches her hair and then pulls a strand into her mouth and chews on it. She takes her coat off and crosses her arms in front of her, she hugs herself. Her mother’s mouth is sewn up now

  Thomas clears his throat. “Stop staring.”

  Hilary says to Jonathan, “If you’re going to stay here, maybe you can help us dig the hole for the grave.”

  “The more the merrier,” Jonathan says.

  Thomas looks at the TV. He crosses his arms in front of him. He watches the glow without seeing the shapes within. Blue lights from the TV move throughout the room, flashing on the walls and ceiling.

  12. Out

  Tess is sitting up in the hospital bed eating her breakfast with as much vigour as she can summon for a piece of dry whole-wheat toast, a glass of orange juice, and a cup of decaffeinated coffee with sugar substitute and skim milk powder. She is starving. Anything would taste good just about now. She even thought of popping open her roommate’s IV bag just to taste the sugar-water solution suspended within. When Billy calls she wants to ask him to bring donuts or cinnamon buns or Danishes, something sweet, something she can fill up on. But she knows she can’t. There’s a hole in her stomach that is hankering for starchy food. No wonder people die in the hospital, she thinks. It’s the food. Or lack of food. Tess’s life is on a downward spiral now. No food equals no lust for life. She thinks she might as well have died.

  Tess thinks of Billy and his sobbing yesterday. In those wet eyes Tess saw something sliding up over her Billy’s trusting twinkle, something besides tears dimming the shine. Tess now, in the sunny morning, eating her breakfast, being alive to the world, starving and afraid to die, wonders if she saw what she wanted to see or if she saw what was really there.

  Tess knows that if she were to die, if she had died yesterday, the world would go on without her. The sun would rise and set and Sue would have her baby and Billy would breathe air and swallow food. Life would move on and she would be dead in a casket, shut up like a turtle in its shell. This thought frightens her. Even with all her bulk she doesn’t really add up to much in this world. Things have got to change.

  Tess feels faint and tired of it all. She is so very hungry. She has licked the crumbs on her plate, has run her tongue around the inside of her orange juice cup, has swallowed all her skim milk powder. Tess moves her tray away, lies back down on her pillow, adjusts her bed to a comfortable level, and tries to close her eyes. Tries to block out all these thoughts about death. She has to focus on living now and what she’s going to do with herself when she’s one-hundred-and-thirty-pounds-slim-as-a-rail. And what’s she going to do when Billy comes clean? Because she knows something happened the night she almost died, and the minute Billy tells her what it was Tess’s whole reason for being will change. But her roommate is waking up now and coughing and spitting and groaning and all Tess can do is listen to the woman’s sounds and feel afraid inside and out.

  “My God,” the woman moans from behind the curtain that is pulled around her bed.

  Tess looks over. She can see the IV stand poking out from the curtain. It shakes a little.

  “Help me.”

  Tess rings the buzzer for the nurse. She sits up and waits. The nurse enters the room, gives one look at large Tess, sitting cross-legged on her bed like a Buddha, pointing a chubby finger at the other bed, and then disappears behind the curtain. The woman’s groaning suddenly stops.

  Tess closes her eyes. Her chest hurts. She feels bruised.

  “Hush,” Tess can hear the nurse scolding. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Sit back down.”

  The nurse noisily pushes back the curtain. Tess opens one eye and looks carefully at her roommate. A shrivelled old woman, small and frail. Her IV bag larger than her upper arm.

  The nurse ties the curtain. “Come now,” she says. “Have you two been introduced? Have you met your roommate, Mrs. Rankle?” The old woman shakes her head.

  “I’m Tess Mount,” Tess says. “Heart attack.”

  “This is Hilda Rankle,” the nurse says loudly, looking at a clipboard on a shelf beside the bed.

  The old woman says, “I don’t know why I’m here. They brought me here and left me to die.”

  The nurse laughs. “You two will be great friends.” She leaves.

  Tess smiles hopefully. The old woman lies back down in her bed on her side and faces Tess. Her eyes are rheumy and pale blue.

  “My son-in-law left me here last week. Just brought me here in the middle of the night, told the nurses that I was unconscious, but I was really sleeping. They’ve operated on me twice since then. I think,” she whispers this, “they are trying to take my organs out. I think they are going to sell them.”

  Tess smiles. “I’m sure that’s not the case,” she says.

  Hilda then begins to list her complaints. She starts with the top of her head; dandruff; split ends, eczema, scabs—and moves slowly down to her toes—athlete’s foot, ingrown toenails, bunions, warts, corns.

  “All these things,” Hilda says, “and they still want my organs. Imagine that. I guess the inside of me is better than the outside.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they aren’t taking anything out of you,” Tess says again.

  “What do you know?” Hilda scowls. “You better watch out too—your inside looks like it’s probably better than that fat outside.”

  “That’s not nice,” Tess says. “That’s an awful thing to say.” Tess’s eyes begin to water.

  “I’m not a nice woman,” Hilda says. “I don’t have much time left. I’m not about to waste it being sweet.” She turns over and faces the wall.

  Tess can see the old woman’s naked back. She tries to think of happy things, beautiful things. But all she can think about is her hunger and her stomach growls.

  And then Billy is standing there in the doorway, a sheepish look on his face, relief etched into his features. Tess looks up at him and through him and over him. She looks around him, trying to judge the way she feels, trying t
o see the aura around his body. The glow of his being, who he is. There is something lurking in the shadows.

  Billy comes to her and holds his hand out. He holds it out as if paying for something, looking down into his hand, looking anywhere but in Tess’s eyes. Tess takes his hand, feels his palm’s smoothness, the callused bumps on his knuckles, the gouges where he picks at the skin around his fingernails She gives a tight squeeze and lets go.

  “Are you okay today?” Tess asks.

  Billy nods.

  “When will I be out of this hospital? I’ve got a horrible roommate,” Tess whispers.

  “Wednesday,” Billy says. “They are doing more tests. Just monitoring you. Checking you out. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m hungry,” Tess says. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse. I wish we had insurance for a private room.”

  Billy smiles.

  “I wanted to ask you to sneak something in, a cake or something, some Kentucky Fried Chicken, but then I remembered my death sentence.” Tess’s eyes begin to tear.

  Billy shakes his head. “It’s a life sentence, Tess. It’s just a new way of looking at life.”

  “Christ, Billy. I might as well have died. You might as well kill me.” She begins to cry. “I can’t live without food. I just can’t do it.”

  Hilda grunts, “If you ask me, you could stand to lose something. You’re as big as an elephant.”

  Billy closes the curtains between the beds. He can feel Tess’s sadness thickening. He can reach out and touch it.

  Tess sobs. “I saw those skinny models on TV, saw their bellies, ribs like ladders, saw their flat breasts. My heart just gave in. Those skinny models, those girls.…”

  “What models? What are you talking about?”

  “Why didn’t you come home the other night? Where were you?”

  Billy opens his mouth to say something. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say. He’s been with Tess forever, it seems. Since they were kids. And they have been happy. Off and on. There have been moments, especially lately, when Billy would like to just get up and leave everyone behind him. Disappear like his father. But he hasn’t. He’s stuck through it all. That must mean something.