Aftermath of Dreaming(114)

A small black swarm of people catches my eye as they rise on a far-away hill, then vanish over the side. A few stragglers make up the rear. There’s one. I head toward them on the winding path, telling myself I’ll read more graves later if I feel like it. Driving over, I had the absurd hope of finding a substitute grave for Daddy. One with something similar, the name—Paul’s not so hard—or some other sign, to represent Daddy’s spirit close by, but at this point, all the tombstones I’ve read are very much only for the person buried deep inside.

I assume I must be noticeable to the mourners as I walk toward the plot where their ceremony has begun, but hopefully not by much. The purple tent covering the glowing hole in the ground is gaudy above the cemetery’s green grass, a flag of grief under the early summer sky.

The funeral I am crashing from a—respectful, I hope—distance has just begun. The gravestones around us are carved in Russian with intricate symbols and letters I can’t read. Pictures of the deceased are emblazoned onto the headstones beneath the words, so the dead smile out through glossy marble in the universal language of a countenance.

A wind is blowing the priest’s incantations away from me, as traffic noise settles in my ear. I pseudobury my father to the sounds of the 10 freeway.

Bending my head in prayer, I ask Mary to help him find peace and deliver him to rest. My mother’s soul I didn’t worry about so much, but my father’s is a different case.

I suddenly realize that someone is staring at me. I glance up to see an older woman with frazzled hair and a frowning mouth nudge the woman next to her and point at me. My attire is appropriate for the occasion, so it can’t be that, though my lip must look really bad—but from this distance, how can she tell? When I was getting dressed I had wished for some kind of hat for my mouth, something to disguise its bad-hair-day-like misshape, but the only thing would have been a gag that really would have been disturbing for mourning.

Then it hits me. I never thought how this might look. An unknown person—a woman, at that—appearing at the graveside. An entirely different TV movie plot than the one I had envisioned spins out in my head. I consider waiting until the end of the funeral and explaining myself to them, but I realize it would sound way too weird, probably even more proof to them that I was sleeping with…

Okay, I am feeling guilty for a sin that I didn’t commit. At least with him, the deceased. At least, I think it was a him, but maybe souls become sexless, so now he’s not any gender.

I feel horrible that I barged into their grief. What was I thinking? Suzanne would be scandalized if she knew. I move toward other graves and look earnestly at names I cannot read. Hopefully that woman won’t come over and speak Russian to me. I try to find a marker for someone they won’t know that I can pretend to have come to visit and just got distracted by their service. I wish I was a mime, my actions eloquently delivering a new truth I hope they’ll believe.

I force myself to sit by a woman’s grave—Irina something-I-can’t-pronounce, buried in 1934, seems safe—until the funeral ends, then the older, frazzled-hair woman glances surreptitiously at me as the last of the mourning party leaves.

Oh, good God. If Reggie would have called me back this week, he might have come here with me, and I wouldn’t have had to worry about all this misinterpretation. Damn him for not calling me; what is his problem? I can’t even think about that friendship ending. I never want to visit a cemetery again. I hope Suzanne and Matt aren’t buried here. And what if Andrew dies soon and suddenly? He could have a heart attack, too. He’s healthy, but who knows? I guess I’d find out the same way I did about his daddy role. That’s a funeral I definitely could not attend, especially like I did this one.

Will you stop with these thoughts, please? Let’s just keep this to Daddy and stop including everyone else, such as complete strangers burying their kin.

I drive home and fall asleep on the couch. I wake up at five in the afternoon in a room of sadness, a room that springs up and encircles me in its walls wherever I move.





33




On the one-week anniversary of finding out Daddy died, the only anniversary I will have since his true death date will forever remain unknown to me, like not knowing your birthday and going through life celebrating it when you like, I call Reggie at eight in the morning, our normal time to have breakfast together. I take it as a good/awful sign that he answers his phone. He hasn’t the other times I’ve called thinking I’d leave him another message to pile on top of all the other unanswered ones, but the last few times I hung up.

“Hello.” He sounds perfectly casual, so I know he knew it’d be me.

“Hi.”

“Hi, Yvette.” As if saying my name exemplifies how close we are.

“Why haven’t you called me?”

He is quiet for a moment, maybe shocked that I came straight out with it.

“You know, honey, you just expect too much from me. I can’t be there for you all the time. Sometimes it has to be about me.”

Now I am quiet for a second while this hits me. “My father died.” I pronounce each syllable to its fullest sound. The formal noun came out instinctively. “So, yes, I expected you might actually call me back.”

“And what am I supposed to do about it?”

That sinks me to the floor; the couch is too high in the air for this. My legs start shaking in anger. “You’re right, Reggie, nothing, clearly. Except maybe say hello, ask how I’m doing, hear what happened—the little bit that I know. You could’ve started by returning my goddamn phone calls and pretending that you give a f*ck, since obviously you don’t.”