Aftermath of Dreaming (34 page)

 

On the fifth day since Daddy died, or since I found out that he died, and having still not heard from Reggie—has he suddenly decided to drop me and is using my father's death as a particularly grisly event to coincide?—so lumping his absence into the barren tundra that is my mind, I decide to go to a funeral from afar. I have no choice. I don't know anyone here who has recently died, and that's a dreadful invitation to want, so it will have to be a stranger's and I'll just keep my distance, like some bad TV movie where the killer appears at the funeral but conspicuously far from the grave.

Which is a bit how this feels—a killer of parts of me that I didn't know even existed before. A cellular longing for my father. An inability to comprehend that he is truly and completely gone. A terror has set in inside me that with him out of this world, I have been unleashed into a void that I won't return from. But at least choosing the outfit for this function is easy: black skirt, black shirt, and black shoes I won't topple
over in. Balance has been an issue these past few days, though I guess the lack of sleep and food could have something to do with that. Gloria brought me a fruit salad yesterday. She saw me haggard and bleary at the mailbox, so I told her why before she could imagine the usual reason for that physical state in this town. Though I'd take hungover whore over grieving daughter any day.

I have no idea if there even is a funeral today, but in a city this large, I figure someone has to have died recently. But just the thought of checking the newspaper or making a call to find one exhausts me, so I find a cemetery nearby and hope for the best. Or worst, I should say.

The Normandy cemetery is one of the oldest in Los Angeles. A huge leaping sprawl of land near the 10 by downtown, its sepulture services aren't as fashionable as Forest Lawn's are in Burbank near Warner Brothers and Disney, but giant pine tree branches roam above the graves, a wind is blowing gently, and cobblestone walks twist and sort themselves throughout, taking me past families who have long since dissolved.

The first headstones I study are old and settled into the earth as if the person they represent was meant for nothing more than to claim this land and prevent modernity from growing here. The distance between me here and them there via the death dates is oddly comforting, a silent somber notice of time's impersonal march.

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.

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 fuck, since obviously you don't.”

“You know that's not true.”

“Well, Christ, if this is how you show you care, I hope to God I never have to find out what it's like when you don't. This is brutal enough.”

“I'm sorry, all right?”

“I just don't understand why you didn't call me. You showed up for me when Momma died, I can't understand why you wouldn't just call me back. There wasn't even a funeral to fly to.”

“This one felt too big for me. I didn't think I could say anything comforting about it. It was your father, for Christ's sake, and now, I mean, both your parents are dead. I had no idea what to say, so I stayed away.”

“But anything you say is a comfort to me. All I needed was to know you were there.”

Reggie says nothing. The line sounds dead. I wonder if he is back on the protein shakes and has learned to sip them quietly. It still hurts to open my mouth and my appetite isn't back yet anyway.

“Yvette, I'm sorry I didn't call you back when you found out your father died. That must have been horrible. Will you tell me about it now?”

He has asked in the gentle tone that I longed to hear from him a week ago, and as I tell him about it a truce is formed through the information leaving me and becoming part of him, for him to have in his memory, so I don't have to carry it alone.

You just never know with people, I think as I hang up the phone. I had never thought that both of my parents dead might flip Reggie out. When Momma died, I joined a club that he was already in, the club of people with one parent no longer alive. The people I had left outside, the ones still with both parents, had no idea what it was like, so I didn't talk to them about it and I could tell they were glad because they didn't want to hear. I never stopped to think—and now I understand why—that there is an even smaller club to go into, the both-parents-gone tribe, and I guess people with one parent still living don't want to talk to this group, want to stay outside with their last parent standing as long as they can, refusing to believe that this club may actually be home one day to them, and better be home to them because the alternative is their own demise.

I am not going to boxing tonight on this one-week anniversary of finding out about Daddy's death. In fact, I have decided never to go back. Dave and the coach will probably think it is because I got flipped out by being hit, but it's not. It's because my drives home from there will always be associated with discovering that Daddy died and I can't have that memory recurring every time I get on the 10 from that point. I know how to hit now, I have a pretty good right jab, so if anything happens I'm prepared. I mean, obviously, hopefully something won't happen, but I'm prepared if it does, so it probably won't. Those are the odds.

 

My grief is round and red and jagged inside me. It is exhausting, but I cannot sleep. It has become harder and harder for me to put myself to bed, like a child whose parent has forgotten his job, so I stay on the couch. Push the decorative pillows off, pull the throw down from the back, and settle in. I have stopped attempting to sleep in my bed, and when I fall asleep on the couch, the scream dream follows me there. In the mornings, I peek in at my bedroom, so bright and untouched, like a storeroom display for sleep that can't be bought. I feel like a visitor in there, no longer master of its purpose. I have lost the ability to be in it at night.

In the mornings, I have a truncated conversation with Reggie, sometimes just hello, and not even while we eat. It is hard to know where more pain is emanating from—losing Daddy, Andrew, or Reggie. Though Reggie isn't gone, we just haven't gotten back to where we were. And probably won't. Which I am starting to think is maybe a good thing. Virtual emotional boyfriend is what he was and exactly the problem really.

After a few weeks, I pull myself together enough to think about my jewelry, which has been flung across the country like my father's soul dispersed God knows where.

The last call I make to Greeley's to check on my line is to their Houston store. I figured I'd finish in the South, irrationally hoping that the relative proximity to my birthplace will have a good-luck effect on what they'll tell me.

“I think, yeah, is it the…?” Then the woman's accent gets even more pronounced as she yells away from the phone, “Sally Ann, look over on your side of the case there, hon, is that the Broussard's Bijoux stuff over there? Those pearly necklaces and things. You know, next to the gold add-a-beads.”

Pearly necklaces and things. Next to the gold add-a-beads. Oh, good God. Can I fall off a cliff right now?

“Uh-huh, we got 'em. What do ya wanna know?”

We've got all of 'em, she could've said to save her coworker from having to count up the pieces as I waited on the phone while dreading that the numbers were getting higher the longer it took. Not a one had sold. Just like in Miami and White Plains. This was not the news I wanted to hear to cheer me up and give me some security after a godforsaken month of dealing with my father's death. But at least Greeley's had already paid me for them. I just hope Linda will still order more.

I peek at my bank accounts and calculate how much living-time the numbers represent. A couple more months, maybe, but I can already see a sliding-into-broke if nothing comes up. Fuck. Another store is the answer, that is obvious enough. Or new commissions, because I am going to need a cash infusion soon to pay the bills for my business and this
apartment that I can't fall asleep in. I pull out my list of private customers and begin addressing envelopes to them that I will put my brochure in, plus a personal note, all the while praying some of them will order new jewelry.

 

The dream feels real and the scream that accompanies it is real, so it's hard not to believe that they both are, but right before I'm attacked, the vision vanishes and my screaming stops, and I realize it's only the dream, but by then it doesn't matter. I've had the emotions, reacted as if they were real, and the emptiness I'm left with is awful. Maybe the scream dream is trying to wake me up, but to what?

 

After another night on the couch of not much sleep, I am in my studio doing research on the Internet. The grief I have been in these past five weeks is not ever-present, I do get breaks when I forget my parentlessness, but most of that time, I'm thinking about Andrew, so loss seems to be the general theme. I've decided to embrace this state, which for my new jewelry means jet.

Jet came into prominence during the Victorian era after King Albert died. Queen Victoria went into an extended period of mourning and wore jet jewelry that affected fashion widely. Back then, it was mined in Yorkshire on the coast of England, but the rough jet I can buy downtown to cut into the shapes I want is from Tibet, where the Buddhism I studied originated.

My second cup of coffee is on the table next to me, Beethoven's Third symphony is playing, and I am feeling almost happy to be delving into the realm of a material I've never used before. I draw some designs on my sketch pad, then read on the computer screen about jet's properties. It is a soft material with a hardness factor ranging from two point five to four, which is about what our fingernails have. Every gem is graded on its hardness, which means how resistant it is to being scratched. A diamond has the highest grade of all—a ten—which is
why nothing can scratch it, not even steel since it has only a seven. I like that jet doesn't have that superhard quality, especially for my work since part of getting through grief is about not resisting. Though it might be nice to add a semiprecious stone to the jet that would back it up somehow, have a piece of resilience so it isn't all soft. Topaz has a hardness of eight and its smoky brown would be beautiful against jet's soft black.

The Eroica symphony is building to its peak when suddenly a heinous noise cuts through, tearing it in two. I jump off my stool and run out of the studio and down the hall before my mind registers what I've heard—self-preservation if there ever was—but I see it as soon as I turn the corner into my living room. There, through the open windows, in the beautiful silver-green-leafed, silver-brown-barked tree, is a small, dark man wielding a chain saw. Entire branches are falling to the ground. Huge, strong, living limbs are being amputated, and with each mutilating stroke more sunlight comes streaming in. The curtain of green is being torn apart in front of me.

“No!” I shout as I run out the door, and continue shouting as I fly down the stairs, finally stopping at the base of the tree. Two men are standing near me, eyeing me as if I am a crazy woman. “Stop!”

The man in the tree notices the commotion, and turns off his saw while looking down at me. He is in a harness tied to the tree—the tree amicably supporting its destroyer.

“No more cutting,” I yell up to him. “It's July. You can't prune a tree right now—it's in the middle of its growth season. You're killing it, don't you see?”

“No comprende,” the man says over and over, smiling each time. He looks at his compatriots and smiles more broadly.

I turn to them. One of them has to be some kind of a foreman, has to speak English of some kind. But they smile at me and repeat the other man's line.

I don't even want to think about what this means about the odds of them being licensed arboriculturists, but of course if they were, they wouldn't be pruning a perfectly healthy tree in the middle of summer in a style that can only be described as demolishing.

I yell “Stop” a few more times, but the roar of the saw eats up my words, then branches start falling all around me like the London Blitz, but without a country to fight back with me. I retreat up the stairs, holding my ears against the terrible noise, unable to look at the violence they are waging.

I go into my studio to try to sit down to work, but my entire insides are trembling. Huge waves of anger are roiling back and forth, trapped inside my body. They hit one side of me, then slap up against the other, then back again, like a filled vessel unable to be emptied out. This must be what my boxing coach was always yelling about, wanting me to get some anger out in my hooks. “Goddamn vegetarian,” he'd say. “Eat some meat, put some blood in your punches, I can see that tofu in your left hook.” I actually don't eat tofu, but I understand now what he meant. I wish that every heavy-bag punch I ever landed could retroactively express what I need to right now. Not that I want to hit these men who are massacring my tree. An Uzi would be much better. No, I don't mean that. Okay, frankly, I am glad there are no weapons around because I feel completely at the mercy of my rage. Goddamn motherfuckers, why is everything being destroyed, never to be seen again?

 

It is hell sleeping on my couch now that the tree has been desecrated. Light from the street lamp pours into my living room, a horrendous luminous reminder of the brutality that occurred. When I finally do fall asleep around four or five
A.M.
, I awaken a few hours later in that nonremembering slumber state and am shocked each time to see the terrible stubby limbs, the sad absence of leaves, the piece of wood that used to be a tree. And the tree isn't even a ghost of itself because a ghost is all spirit with no form. This tree has lost both.

 

“Her name's Betty.”

Like in
The Glass Menagerie
I almost say but don't since I have a feeling Reggie won't like the comparison, though it's a not a bad one.
The gentleman caller's fiancée in that play was named Betty. The name stuck out at me in the production I saw with Momma and Suzanne at the Saenger in New Orleans, an emotionally redundant afternoon if there ever was one. Betty.

“I met her at the museum,” Reggie continues on the phone while I stand over my stove, stirring what must be my millionth pot of oatmeal. “I was wandering around the decorative arts wing, and she came in looking all cool with her clipboard and museum things, and we struck up a conversation and ended up talking for half an hour.” Like he and I did when we met, I think. “We've been together since.”

“That's great, Reggie.”

Years ago, Reggie told me that when he first moved here he used to hang out at the museum hoping to meet a rich dowager (his word) to marry and endure until she died and he inherited all her money. I don't know if I should be surprised at the twist of fate that he's seeing someone he met there, albeit an associate curator, or laugh at the irony.