Bury the will to live #1
The grown-ups glistered in their satins, crisp as lemon peels with gems for canapés in every hand and mouth, everything prosecco and rainbow, and too much with their aggressive aliveness, made of better remains, and me in the middle counting ice cubes, a black hole wishing I had dressed the part. Like moustache-for-an-eyebrow man who got mean on grappa and blabbered about “Susan,” “ex-Susan,” “Susy,” “Sweetusan,” called her everything but gone. Outbursts my parents referred to as “a bit much,” as “on the spectrum,” as “geez Louise” before dad yanked the emergency happiness kit from his pocket, the one he’d carried since Martin, peeled from it the photo of a Bali sunset and two pills, one of which he handed to Susan’s ex.
“Twenty minutes,” dad said. “You ever been to Oman?”
I sat on the Hintzman’s lawn chair, pretending to read a book, pouting in my marine dress that I’d howled for after black got shot down; mom saying black wasn’t even a color and besides “so, so sad,” unfriendly sad, and who wanted to talk to sad people anyway? I did. And someday I’d meet the saddest person in the world.
But I was fourteen, stuck at another party with blizzards of cheerfulness sipping cornbread juice, strangers who waved in passing, swishing geometric skirts, and if I so much as glanced, they waddled over forcing small talk on me, their favorite question being (always) what I was going to be when I grew up.
“Funeral director,” I yelled.
They laughed, which proved my point about adults not taking anything seriously especially when teenagers were clearly suffering more than anyone had ever suffered in the history of suffering. My parents sighed, affirmed I was going through a phase, a Picasso phase. And I thought, that’s right, keep on coming with clichés and I’ll drown my head in a bucket of blue paint.
“She’s adopted,” dad joked.
“No long faces in our house,” mom reassured. And I sucked in my lips until my mouth was gone.
I played corpse the whole ride back, dead weight against the vinyl, my parents lobbing wonderful wonderfuls. Mom clicked off the radio when the news came on. She’d been doing that since I could remember, had it in her blood like some ladies take to swatting a fly.
Then the door clicked open and I came alive, slapped an invitation in their hands for my next funeral.
“Don’t be late,” I said and stomped off to scrub my teeth black with the charcoal paste.
Bury a plant
Come Sunday they crowded into my room. The stuffies in the mourners’ section upfront, the parents in the back. I’d pinned up my sketches of coffins and girls with angel wings mom called “tacky.” I pointed to the sole survivor. An aloe vera by the name of Vera, only heiress to the star pot the bunny ear cactus had left behind.
“Handshakes after the service,” I reminded the room, climbed onto my bed, took my place behind the cardboard box, and began the eulogy.
“A tough cactus.” I let my voice crack a bit. “Real good cactus. We’re here because Bunny Ear died and three people forgot about him. And I know you’re thinking it’s just a plant but everything’s just something until it’s nothing and the nothing is what keeps me up at night.”
Mom rolled her eyes, which I coughed off and glanced at Vera soaking up all the window light.
“Thing about being good at being forgotten,” I said, dragging it out so they’d get it. “Is that you disappear.”
I looked each guest in the eye—Buttonbear, Croctopuss, mom, dad. No snickering this time. Not like last month when the newspaper croaked from rain poisoning and dad laughed so hard he choked. Mom tried to hold the line but her face split and she was gone as well, bent over the ironing board in hysterics. A death with tears. So technically, a success. This time they stayed quiet, acted the way people do when the kings die on TV and everyone knows somebody important just went away forever.
After my speech I walked through the row with a rinsed can, shaking the pennies in the bottom, said it was for podium maintenance.
“Can’t you have a normal hobby?” mom sighed. “Your friend Maddy likes ponies doesn’t she?”
“You’re literally the worst,” I whispered, then announced loudly there was ice cream in the kitchen, picked up the shoebox though it had weight, had covered the thing in chocolate wrappers on account of there not being any newspapers in our house. Dad claimed it was because of the silverfish eating them, but I’d seen him once at SunshineMart holding one, a headline about twins drowning. He stood there in frozen foods, his breath making clouds, reading the same paragraph over, over then careful, careful folded it, put it back, wiped his palms on his khakis. He’d lost a brother many years ago. Martin, hungover from a debt, riddled with gingivitis until drowning seemed like orthodontia compared to living with a mouth full of bankruptcy.
Mom stood by the counter, scooping vanilla from the tub, giving three if you smiled. I pointed at bear and crocodile.
“They don’t look hungry,” she said.
“You think they’re grieving?” I asked. “Mrs. Meier said some people starve themselves when they’re upset.” Mrs. Meier, who taught art and wiped her nose at the Van Goghs. Mrs. Meier was a spaghetti.
“Nonsense. Everyone loves ice cream.”
“What about our guests then?”
“They’ve eaten,” dad interrupted, and that was that. I didn’t argue. The cream sat cold across my molars. And I thought of gran who used to love sucking on frozen cubes of jam. They said she’d passed in her sleep, but I thought she died on purpose, out of boredom or spite, or because she finally realized the last thing she’d ever taste now with the diabetes would be sugarfree pudding.
Bury a gran
Last year at St. Agatha’s, the T-rex church on Maple with the AA meetings in the basement. Walking down the aisle, my legs buzzed with god or death scratching from inside my calves. I swiped the kneelers in our row, stacked them tall, got my head higher than my cousin Sally’s sculptured do. The pulpit hunched in front, carved with vines and grapes so fat they looked ready to burst if you poked them. The windows burst in melted crayons. I wanted to lick one, see if it tasted of poison or spirit.
The casket gleamed up front, too roomy for one afterlife. I thought of gran rattling around in there, a pinball of mentholatum, wondered if they’d tossed in her purse, if she’d brought snacks, a crossword, imagined her spitting at the handles and polishing them with a sleeve, the way she’d always fiddled with the clasp on her purse before fishing out a nougat.
“Don’t tell your mahm,” she’d say.
I’d paw at the wrapper and ask her all the questions I knew not to ask at home.
“What happens when we die?”
“We go to a better place.”
“Better than what?”
“Earth.”
“And people cry about that?”
“People miss each other.”
“Do they miss that the one who’s died can’t have chocolate now?”
“Oh yes, terribly so.”
I sucked my nougat greedily.
The morning gran had fallen asleep and not woken up again, dad made a show of how she’d been an ancient lady who’d lived a life so full it burst, squeezed the juice from a wrinkled orange to demonstrate, and mom jumped in with it too, repeating “great life, amazing life.” The two of them yapping how she’d walked on her own until the end, brain still firing, never needed one of those motorized contraptions.
“You don’t have to be ancient to have lived a good life,” I blurted. “Like Martin.” Nobody said anything after that. You could live a good life and still be sad. I left my toast. Later I tried to sob in the bathroom, made the sound the bastard cats made in our garden in the summer, so hot and bothered they’d gurgle at the moon. I dripped water in my eyes and stared at mirror me. Did I look like someone who had lost? Same dimples and those almond brows, my silly bob. Chicken bob girl, cry, cry, cry.
At the church I sat under the cross hoping for the tears to come. The pastor marinated in his licorice, buttoned up tight so his insides wouldn’t fall out.
“Elsa is gone,” he began. “And we’re not. That’s the condition we’re left with this morning. Amen. I’ve seen a lot of death in my day but this one… an elbow bump to the soul.”
Shiny-head uncle up front jerked, coughed the condolences from his ribs. Mom tsked at his animal tones. The man beside him heaved.
“Don’t look,” mom whispered. But I kept looking, greedy for the torn parts, wanted to suck on what love did when it broke.
Down a bit and sideways, an aunt or someone from gran’s block wrung her palms. Her jaw wide open. Pure wind. Her mascara streaked along her collarbone, disappeared into her cleavage. Mom poked me in the thigh.
“We’re leaving,” she whispered, her hand shivering.
“I’m staying,” I hissed loud enough for heads to turn. It all went to slush in front of me and I needed to see it.
Bury the will to live #2
The grown-ups with their sun-munched skin gnawed on shrimp that looked like fetuses. A woman in a gingham headband leaned too far into my bean dip and asked what I was to be when I grew up. She smelled of zinnias and vodka.
“Dead,” I said.
She threw her head into a cackle.
“She means writer,” mom said. “Big imagination.”
“I meant dead,” I said again quieter, wishing I’d stayed in the Jackson’s bathroom reading the contents of the missus’s lotions, all those acids and laboratory words making a face forgive itself..
“You’re hilarious.” The woman wiped her mouth with a napkin that said HAPPY in metallic print. I left my dip there and went to stand behind the grill smoke. One of the Jacksons was burning meat and it smelled pissed off, no longer wanting to be eaten. Steel drum music blared. A woman led a conga procession through a yard of citronella and a dozen folding chairs. Her fleshy bike shorts caught on roses; her shirt said I Survived Myself. Behind, adults marched and clapped, swinging trays of shrimp and tanks of oxygen.
“We beat it!” they extolled, though they’d single-handedly knocked the cancer out of the pale uncle, a man no older than fifty who slouched slurping a green soda through a straw with a million loops, his shirt riding up his belly on each sip. The party train circled him.
“Alive,” they sang.
Someone gave him a party hat with SURVIVOR in gold glitter on the front. It kept sliding from his smooth head, covering one eye. He pushed it up, it slid again. Push, slide. Nobody came to tighten it.
“Looking good, Randy!” someone shouted.
I drilled my fork into a nub of potato in the salad, warm and wet, basically chewed already. The plastic wrap sucked and rocked in the heat. Flies walked the rim. My dress stuck behind my thighs. Mom said the peach linen made me look fresh but I felt like a bandage.
Dad joined the line, all elbows sideways, hands in the air, face lit as if the music was coming from inside him. Mom knocked her knees together.
“Now that’s what we call remission,” they cried.
A paper lung came loose from a streamer and drifted into cancer uncle’s lap. He plucked at it, found me staring at him, and grinned. I smiled back. I didn’t mean to.
Bury myself
Dad went for the lid, said nothing about it being warm. Mom arranged bear and croc in the tub, stared at the mirror like she thought the eulogy might be written backwards on her face, then plopped down on the hamper.
I had taped the program to the towel rack. My funeral. Below, a playlist. A CD found in the glove box labeled Judy’s mix. Do not erase. I’d tacked a photo of myself barely smiling on the tiles behind me, had pressed myself into the black blouse with pearl buttons I’d worn for gran’s funeral. I lay flat on the bath mat inside a beanbag I’d hollowed for a casket. Foam balls bounced around us. I crossed my arms over my chest and didn’t blink. Dad held the card with the reading and squinted.
“She liked toast,” he said. “She saw a possum give birth.” That was all I’d written for him. He nodded, folded the card in half and tucked it in his shoe. Mom didn’t read. She laughed once, a spiked sort of giggle that could prick a person, then picked at the sink plug with her fingernail. I let a tear from staring at the ceiling for too long pool in my right eye and tried not to blink to keep it there. Dad asked if that was the end of it. I didn’t answer, pretended to be dead. Mom stood huffing, opened the cabinet under the sink, pulled out bottles, soap, toothpaste, the pill jars, and rolls of toilet paper, then put it all back in a different order. She grabbed a box of tampons, plucked one, and held it like a stick of chalk.
“You want grief?” she asked. “Real grief?” She dropped the tampon in the trash and walked away.
“She’ll be alright,” dad said softly. “Her only daughter just passed.” He left the door open when he got out. I stayed on the floor long enough for my arm to numb, for the bathmat to print itself onto my cheek, becoming what carpets dream when they dream of skin. Perhaps they would forget me here, would step over my body in the morning on the way to pee, would say “how terrible” and finally, finally sob.
From down the hall came the spoons clinking, the freezer door dragging, a candy tune with drums that went pat pat dah, and my parents singing though they hadn’t just attended their daughter’s funeral. I tried to hate them for it, hate their way of surviving, how they made a joke from everything—overdue mortgage bills, a world going hot, rich men riding a power trip on a giant dick. How they could pull celebration from the leftovers after their friends began getting diagnoses of things with too many syllables, how they’d worked out not to die from every death, to make the air find them still. I didn’t have the words for that kind of staying alive.
I pictured the pair now spooning the vanilla straight from the tub. Then my back itched and my mouth dried, and my stomach growled, and I was getting cold and stiff, and maybe I didn’t want to meet the saddest person in the world anymore. Maybe I didn’t want to be dead either.
In the kitchen, mom and dad were whistling into ladles and waltzing with a chair. They waved me into their circle. I moved my hips, forcing a “woo.” It sounded ironic. I tried again, straighter because pretending seemed to work for them. Perhaps not forever but long enough to raise a daughter who hadn’t learned yet that sadness was a luxury for people who didn’t have to keep showing up. One spoon came my way. Vanilla. So, so sweet.
