Hard Mouth

by Amanda Goldblatt

  The next week we sat in a law office in the presence of a respectfully glum stranger. His left French cuff had a grease stain; I watched this as he made the posthumous report. Who needed glamor, I thought, in times like these, or ever?

  Pop did not, it turned out, want to be buried, as he and Ma had discussed during the kidney issues of yore. This was fine with Ma; he wanted to be cremated. But the second part of the demand unsettled her with its witchy romance: He wanted his ashes to wait, until such time that Ma’s body was also ashes, so that the ashes could be commingled. I was to do the commingling. I only wish he’d asked. And specified what to do with the resulting admixture. He professed, in the document, not to care. But I did not want to make it a permanent installation, wherever I’d be living then.

  We would not, I resolved, bicker over Pop’s wishes. It was unseemly. “Ma,” I said lightly. “Do you care?” She reported that I could throw the ashes down the garbage disposal, as long as they were together. We laughed!

  The lawyer, politely ignoring this warm family scene, drummed his fingers and reported that everything of Pop’s would go to Ma. There was life insurance that would make her life slightly easier than it could have been. There were debts to settle still. The lawyer said goodbye. We said goodbye too, and passed through the low halls of the building, and out into the daylight.

  KEN SLEPT OVER that entire first week, on a sleeping bag next to the sofa where I myself laid down each night. My room was available but I didn’t want to go in it. Ma slept there instead. Ken seemed sorry. Or he behaved like he was sorry. Or I imagined he was sorry. I was sorry too. Some nights, we spooned. I let my body sink into his, corseted by his arm, and hoped we wouldn’t topple off the couch. I wanted to talk about normal things but couldn’t say the words.

  DURING THAT FIRST week, tasks were completed, requested and expedited by phone, by other people’s off-screen industriousness. Expressionless company men came and fetched the wheelchair, the mechanized bed. This was replaced by a new mattress and box spring, on which Ma pledged she would someday sleep. The cremation business was easily dispatched; there were, after all, professionals and their systems and templates for such a thing. I tried not to think of the oven. At the bank I arranged for a safety deposit box in which to store the ashes. It was unclear if this was legal, but I didn’t care. I wanted them out of the house. Rounding a corner, talking or laughing or dusting the mantel, I did not want to encounter the ashes of my father—it would upset our work toward loss tolerance, to be reminded. We tried to make it easier for ourselves but failed. There would be no blossoming acceptance, only a kind of gross seep.

  IN ABSENCE OF a service we held a dark and dressy open house. It was a damp affair. I don’t mean the eyes: just the day, its feeling. It was unreasonably hot, summer in spring. People sweated into the folds of their mourning togs. There were tears, though not from Pop’s stoic womenfolk. I stood like an ancient cairn, beside Ma, who performed a role I could not have named. She patted shoulders and let people talk to her, explain at her, though I do not think she was listening to anything, except, perhaps—if she was like me—the long and low drone of shock tearing through the otoliths and canals and cochlea, blotting out any good word, or, indeed, any word. We all go through eras of feeling and not feeling. I was in some area of my body grateful for the casseroles that came through the door. Ken stood as Pop’s most proper envoy, slick and doleful in his navy button-down and dark khakis. The real estate folks raised their beer and wine, a toast for Pop, and his long-loyal family. Carmen gave us a hug, and a clutch of sunflowers tied with a white silk ribbon. The day grew long. The mourners left. Even Ken evacuated. Then it was only us two. We drank wine in the same room, and then separated to sleep.

  I thought then, or understood: there is no next thing. I was no longer waiting. No anvil swinging. I lay back in my old bed, Ma in hers. Before sleep I barked a sob then shut myself off. We repeated this night many nights. Without Pop the house felt anonymous as a chain motel room in an unremarkable town. It promised nothing but its walls. I attempted not to think of Ma, hands crossed over her chest, eyes open in the imperfect dark.

  ONE MORNING I woke and turned toward the light beyond the blinds. I had left a half-emptied glass of wine on the sill. I rose to take it to the kitchen sink.

  Ma was at the table looking at the newspaper, some lighter section. Home, or Style. Weekend. The pages shushed like skin running across skin. I found I perceived many things like this, now: of the body (gross, intimate, decaying) or not of the body (null set).

  I poured out the wine and ran the faucet. I put the glass in the dishwasher, clicking its stem between two stanchions. The kitchen was clean and its lack of disarray felt meaningful. However I felt unable to wonder why. Would Ma be like this forever? It would only last the shock. I had been gone. I had been gone and things and people were different or the same. I resisted any wet sentimentality, any saturated animal feeling, only wanted the sharp blade of loss. It wouldn’t come; it wouldn’t come for years.

  Later beside the kitchen sink I saw a tall white candle poured into a glass cylindrical volume. I asked Ma what it was for and had she bought it. She responded in a vague way. “Someone left it the other day,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you who.” Indeed it was not a gift anyone who knew us would’ve left. Who knew us, even, anymore.

  My but Ma’s hair looked greasy in the sunlight, clumped at the crown, supported by a buttress of flaked scalp. We were letting it ride, weren’t we. No, we weren’t—for I blinked again and saw that her tresses were clean and arranged, and shining as a brass doorknocker. I had simply seen what I’d been used to seeing. We were marching on. We were not so depraved as to eat, metaphorically, floating fish. We killed, metaphorically, what we ate. And kept finding ways to stay alive.

  “You’re supposed to burn it and keep it burning, in memory,” Ma said, not looking up, with her stunning, clean hair draping the sides of her face. “You’d know things like that if I’d ever taken you to services.” Not making eye contact. This was a kindness. We were now worried that everything we said would mean something. Even though nothing we ever said meant anything, not to ourselves, and not to each other, not past the obvious, not past the factually true.

  “What should we do with it?” I asked. Ma got up to come look at the thing. “I guess we could burn it.”

  “Burn it or throw it out.”

  “I’m not sure I’m at the try-anything stage of grief yet,” I said.

  Ma clicked her tongue percussively. “I think I might be hungry.”

  I could not remember her ever saying this, prior. I’m certain she’d said it prior and yet. “Let’s go to the diner,” I said.

  “No, I don’t want to.” She suggested pupusas. I countered with pizza.

  While we considered this I watched her take a matchbook from a little dish, a round dish that double-exposed just then with the cabin’s sun-shaped trivet. I had been so many places. My body was here now—a mass of things pulsing, a mess of things, a mess, a body. I watched Ma take the match and strike it, and light the candle. She set it in a bowl of water and put the bowl and candle in the empty sink. “This is how you do it,” she said, seeing how I watched her. On a zipper, I thought. Cup the flame with your hand. Some gasoline—

  “So pizza?” I asked.

  “Okay,” she said. “Yes.”

  We went to the strip mall and got a small pizza with green peppers and sausage and split it, with Sprites, chewing and swallowing like people do. The vinyl tablecloths were smeared with grease; the crowd was burbling genially and I didn’t know what day of the week it was. Surely all around us were those who’d experienced loss, not currently thinking of it. Who had the faces of lost loved ones set in thick silver frames, on coffee tables and bedside tables and dressers. We chewed. We filled our stomachs. Ma paid the bill.

  When we got home I walked directly to the sink to look at the candle. There was an inch now of molten wax, clear as water. The small flame sprea
d its orange, reflected across the steel basin of the sink. I retreated from its burn.

  We went about our day and night. We watched the local news. We did not discuss where to put the crates of tapes. We went to our separate beds. I texted Ken: “Had pizza with Marilyn. Don’t worry. Talk soon. XO.” He texted back: “Thinking of you. Call tomorrow.”

  Since all of this I have tried not to hold on to any clear intention. I left my resolve on the mountain, my anger too. But for a while, I thought daily of every death, past and potential. Then on one otherwise unremarkable day, I did not; I thought nothing of my past. Every day I wake up and the world persists. It is nearly incredible. I live by inches or acres. I am not who I was.

  That next day when I woke I saw that there was a gauzy, spreading mist hanging above our overgrown lawn, over the clovers and dandelions and broadleaf dock, all shuddering in a breeze. The mist behaved as a Vaselined lens. It felt too symmetrical to my own state. I was in the mood for performative acts; I was in the mood for breakage; I let this drama push me into vigilance. I went to get a glass of water. In the kitchen sink the candle burnt on. There was the heavy transparence of liquid wax, for inches. Then a bright new translucence all the way down to a small disk, which weighted the wick at its base.

  I put my hand above the flame and felt its heat. I felt the radiating heat of the glass. I felt my palm heating as it reddened and baked. When I thought I would not be able to stand this for much longer, I lowered my hand over the mouth of the candle. I sealed the volume and watched the fire go out. I recognized myself.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was made in the context of great care given by many people. Thanks to my agent, Caroline Eisenmann at Frances Goldin Literary Agency, for her galvanizing editorial work and guidance, and to my editor, Jennifer Alton, for her trust, sharp perspective, and vision. Thanks to everyone at Counterpoint Press, for their incredible support.

  Thanks to Alissa Nelson and Matthew Leach for providing me supporting information about fruit flies in a lab setting. For Denny’s reference texts, I used The Complete Wilderness Training Manual by Hugh McManners and The Art and Science of Taking to the Woods by C. B. Colby and Bradford Angier. As I wrote this book, my repeat readings of Mary Ruefle’s stunning piece “Monument” (from The Most of It, published by Wave Books) inspired my usage of the word “conflagration” and the passage surrounding, which can be found toward the end, during the final movement between Denny and Haw. That movement itself was cued by Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café. Several books, films, and artworks were influential to the long process of writing this novel, but these informed it most materially.

  Thanks to the generous friends who have read and talked to me about this book over the years, including but not limited to: Dani Blackman, James Scott, Elizabeth Ellen, Kyle Winkler, Diane Cook, Rebecca Rukeyser, Laura Adamczyk, Suzanne Scanlon, and Olivia Cronk.

  Thanks to my wonderful mentors at the Washington University in St. Louis MFA Program. Thanks to Kathleen Finneran. Thanks to Kathryn Davis, Marshall Klimasewiski, Kellie Wells, and Kerri Webster. Thanks to the writers there.

  Thanks to my friends and teachers at Hampshire College, who emboldened and inspired me. Thanks to Media Services, for the fun and for the knowledge.

  Thanks to my colleagues, and especially thanks to my student writers—with whom I have learned so much—at Washington University in St. Louis, at the University of Michigan, at Eastern Michigan University, and at Northeastern Illinois University.

  Thanks to the Vermont Studio Center and to the Sewanee Writers Conference for their support and community and time. Thanks to the great writers, artists, and facilitators I met at both of these places, who read and talked to me about earlier drafts of this book.

  Thanks to my oldest friends, Joanna Kete Walker and Amy Knesel. Thanks to Alex Baldino. Thanks to all of my friends, for being the people they are and for doing the work they do. I am so grateful.

  Thanks to the Erickson-Guss family, and thanks to the Barnes family, for their steadfast and warm camaraderie.

  Thanks to the Hickses, new family I’m so, so lucky to have.

  Thanks to my dear, caring, and funny uncles and aunts: David and Marty Schindler, and Susan Goldblatt and David Dean (in memory).

  This book is partly dedicated to the memory of my grandmothers, Ruth Schindler and Pearl Goldblatt—both adventurers in their own fashion. I would also like to memorialize here my grandparents Oscar Schindler, Harold Goldblatt, and Elaine Goldblatt.

  Thanks to my parents, Abby Schindler Goldblatt and James Goldblatt, whose immense love and support have made my life and work possible. I could not ask for more.

  And thanks to Jordan Hicks, for his sweet conspiracy. His brilliance, compassion, love, and partnership have made my life, my life.

  © Jordan Hicks

  AMANDA GOLDBLATT is a writer and teacher living in Chicago. She was a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and her fiction and essays have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review, Noon, Fence, Diagram, Hobart, and American Short Fiction. Hard Mouth is her debut novel.