No One Is Talking About This (41)
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“That one,” her sister told the undertaker, and pointed to a casket sunk deep with pillowy satin, an open valentine that even in the picture seemed to lower itself perpetually into a white ground. Something of her old voice returned to her here, the one that stamped her born in 1987 and that had seemed so in danger of disappearing. “That one right there. Because she classy.”
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After the meeting, she wandered through what looked like a gift shop, full of brass urns and memorial collages, pocket watches and Swarovski roses, granite slabs sandblasted with the faces of bygone Lindas. She lingered there for a considerable time, picking up paperweights and setting them down, for she only ever liked to travel when she got a souvenir. did you know you can get your ashes put into a golf ball? she texted a friend. did you know that your casket can be camouflage? did you know they can put you in a papier-maché turtle and release you into the sea?
it me
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Man, it’s a hot one
started to flicker out of the radio as they were driving home, and her father and brother-in-law began, in sweet fraternity, to extol the virtues of Carlos Santana’s guitar playing, which they could only describe as being out of this world.
My mu?equita
my Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa
A dead reflex kicked in her throat. Had she ever found that funny? Or had the laughter waited, external, for her to give in and join it?
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At the nail salon, the technician introduced himself as Google. “Because I know everything,” he said. He smiled against a blinding wall of every imaginable color, a hand with a thousand fingertips, heaven, and asked if they were going to a party. She whispered to him the truth and Google crossed himself; now he knew one more thing. “I’ll do glow-in-the-dark, OK?” he said, and began buffing the nails with infinite gentleness. “Go into the dark later and you’ll see them, every one.”
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The Men’s Wearhouse where the boys were measured for their suits was holy; the T.J. Maxx where the girls texted each other pictures from their respective dressing rooms was holy; the Shoe Carnival where they staggered up and down the aisles almost laughing; the Michael’s where they chose posterboards for collages; the florist where they pointed at baby’s breath; the bakery where they deliberated over tea cookies; the Clinique counter where they bought waterproof mascara; the Cheesecake Factory where they ate bang-bang shrimp after it all and were very very kind to each other was holy, and the light fixtures she always made fun of seemed to bloom the whole time on their stems.
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The dog who had met and kissed the baby came to the nighttime visitation and lapped at the long line of mourners as they blew through the door. “Animals are allowed?” she asked the funeral director. “Animals are allowed,” he said, and told her that once a horse had come, and was led up the aisle so he could nuzzle his owner for the last time, seeking among her face for sugar cubes, breathing the just-cut hay of her hair, still feeling in his body the hot red Yes that jumped to her smallest commands. But “Let me go” was now the order, and what the body said was No.
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The dog was lowered to the baby in her casket and greeted her with visible recognition. Everyone wept at this, for she was still as a peach in a painting, and she wore an opaque mask of makeup and was no longer warm. Her eyes had been glued shut, and her hands no longer commanded the air, and her squeal had been returned to sound itself—so what was it about her that he recognized, what was it about her that the little dog still loved? Yet he did. He scrambled among the valentine satin and tried to wash her face back to what he knew.
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I am I because my little dog knows me—who said that? She swore she had seen it somewhere in the portal, painted on a piece of plywood and hanging in someone’s home. As the wake murmured on around her, she climbed up bodily on the banister that separated the dead from the living and sat there, letting the line multiply behind her, leaning close to the child’s ear to tell her goodbye, I am I because my little dog knows me.
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The neurologist showed up toward the end, and she found herself asking why she had gone into that green growing field, why she had chosen to study the human brain in the first place. The choice glowed with greater meaning, as the starlike tracheotomy scar on the throat of the respiratory therapist had glowed. “That’s a very long story that I’ll tell you someday,” the woman smiled, so that she saw her standing barefoot in the branches of her own family tree, white asterisks on the shoulders of her black wool coat.
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To be a member of a generation meant that her sister put on a hot pink dress for the funeral, chose lipstick and towering high heels to match, all the while yelling, “WE GOTTA LOOK GOOD FOR OUR BABY!” To be a member of a generation meant that the casket was pink too, a new shade of pink just recently named, that someone snuck a bright clear amethyst into it before it was closed. That the hour she was buried was dark inside the day, and rain fell in its great gray population; that the whole family gathered outside, which still existed, and stood under an evergreen tree. That trap music was played at the wake, that afterward they ate barbecue, that her brother slapped his chest and told his sister, “Girl, she was a real one.” So specificity was present as a living thing, a guest.