Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (10 page)

12

The proper way to engage a traveling funeral, Katherine decides, is at the airport bar lounge. She has selected the largest bar, the one before Terminal D that fans out into a corral of loose tables where a small funeral procession can gather for its inaugural send-off.

Her lawyer’s eye for detail has thought of just about everything. Jill, Laura and Rebecca have maps of the terminal with a black
F
for “funeral” in the exact spot of the Capistrano Bar & Lounge that has a lovely view of airplane wings, parents running after screaming toddlers, two drunk salesmen, a kiosk where you can purchase all the junk you forgot to buy on your vacation for the neighbors who are watching the dog, and a bartendress who looks as if she was born to serve five-dollar glasses of beer, four-dollar shots, and advice for everything from an airplane hangover to how to purchase stocks from the fast-rising stars of the business world.

In the past eight days Katherine has been a flurry of activity. Calls to the pallbearers—check. Arrange time off of work—check. Make sure daughter Sonya can stay at her best friend’s house—check. Explain this trip to friends and boyfriend—check. Tell yourself over and over again this is for Annie and it’s totally justified—check. Worry incessantly about what this will do to an already regulated and schedule-driven life that makes no allowances for free time, change or levity—check. Reservations for all the planes and trains and automobiles and hotels and at least two restaurants that probably have never had anyone call and ask if they can make a reservation—check. Pick up a mysterious package from the post office that came from Annie’s boys and that is now riding in the bag next to her at the airport rendezvous—check. Worry about what Annie wanted and didn’t want for the traveling funeral—double check. Convince her boyfriend Alex that she has not lost her mind—sort of check. Allowed herself to fall into the funeral, enjoy it, honor Annie and their friendship—about to check.

While she is running through the real checklist that she has pulled from her backpack, the phone rings. It’s Marie. She’s in between patients and trying out her first call with her fine new telephone. Marie will not make the first leg of the journey. Marie will keep trying to find replacements. Marie hopes to make it to Florida. Marie, the grief counselor, has not even been on the traveling funeral and she is already missed.

“Hey, baby,” Marie tells Katherine, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on Annie’s cell phone that is painted in bright red. It’s nail polish. Little dots here and there. The polish Marie used to put on Annie’s nails when they talked and waited for the medicine to grab hold of her veins and whip them into submission. “Is the funeral procession about to begin?”

“Marie. Where are you?”

“Somewhere between Jessie Franklin and Bob Greiese.”

Katherine laughs. This is a good start. This is how it’s supposed to be, she thinks. Funerals do not have to be long crying jags and people leaning into walls—well, not all of the time anyway.

“It’s a bit early. I’m having a Bloody Mary, pacing myself you know, and trying to remember what I have probably already forgotten to do. I’m just a little nervous. What if we all get here and there’s a catfight or someone immediately doesn’t like someone else?”

Now Marie laughs. Through several phone calls she has come to understand why Annie picked Katherine to be their Girl Scout leader, the head of the class, the funeral director.

“You kill me, pardon the pun. Baby, it’s women. You won’t ever forget anything because between all of you there will be one of everything in the entire world. And getting along? There will be something. There’s always something, whatever it is won’t last long. I’ve heard Annie talk about all of you. I can’t imagine too many rough spots.”

Marie recounts the time she went on a retreat of hospice workers and all but two were women. “There were almost fifty of us,” she explains to Katherine while she maneuvers down a road that was meant to be driven with two hands and not one. “By the end of the weekend even the men were walking around in their bathrobes asking us if they could borrow deodorant. I have this hysterical photo of one of the women blow-drying this one man’s hair while a woman standing next to him is putting on lip gloss.”

“You’re right, Marie,” Katherine acknowledges. “Once when all the flights in Atlanta were grounded because of a freak snowstorm, I spent two nights in a hotel room with a woman I had never met before in my life and within twenty minutes we felt like twin sisters and I still talk with her a couple times a year.”

“So,” Marie admonishes her as she takes a curve way too fast, “don’t worry. With this group you could probably regear a jet, turn a hotel inside out and come up with a spare toothbrush, enough Tampax to supply an Army brigade, and coupons for free oil changes. There’s bound to be something, there always is. Stop worrying. It will work out.”

Katherine cannot stop worrying. What if something happens at work? What if her daughter needs her? What if she discovers something on the trip that is a huge secret that Annie has kept hidden from the rest of the world? What if, in spite of all of the good intentions, one of the women turns out to be a total pain in the ass? What if there is a glitch in Annie’s plan?

“Stop it,” Marie says, reading her mind. “You’ve thrown enough guilt into the wind to last a lifetime. Don’t forget Annie wanted you to have a good time and toss her ashes into the wind.”

“Oh, that.”

They discuss the first leg of the trip—the ominous and pending initial flight to New Mexico. The drive after that in an already-too-small Jeep toward Santa Fe. The drive west from beyond the other side of Albuquerque to a place neither of them can remember or pronounce. A hike on a trail that right now might as well be in the Amazon. Marie explains the terminal complications of her next two patients and shares an update on her daughter’s spring dance dress ensemble and then they talk about how glad they are to know each other.

“Marie, you are remarkable.”

“Wait until I show up and start bossing everyone around. You may never speak to me again.”

“Are you kidding? I’m moving in. I hear you have a vacancy coming up what with one of your twenty-one daughters off to college and all,” Katherine banters back.

“Baby, this is wonderful news. She cleans the downstairs bathroom.”

“On second thought, I’m canceling this cell phone service.”

Katherine glances at her watch. Ten minutes until the official funeral, minus the hours of planning and worrying and racing around trying to connect the women in Annie’s life.

“Marie, when can you call back? Do you really think you can make it to Florida or New York?”

“Depends on what I find under Jessie’s shirt and behind Bob’s feeding tube. I’m trying, Katherine. I want to be there.”

Katherine has imagined Marie’s life beyond their phone calls, the insanity—so she thinks—of all the dying, all the loss, and mingling that with the living she must do with her own family and her own life. It is not the physicalness of her life’s work, the bandages and tubes and the obvious evidence of the demise of skin and bones and limbs and organs on the inside that you cannot see but that you can feel melting away centimeter by centimeter. It is not the way, day by day, she sees the skin shrink and the body begin to curl into positions fetal and birthlike. It’s not what you might find with the woman who refuses to move for five days in a row. It is not the slow wail that starts as a whisper and then moves through the throat of a patient who can no longer summon words to express the degree of pain, the way it feels as if someone is standing on her shoulders with an ax and hammering it into the center of her chest—at that perfect spot between her two breasts. It is not that. Not at all.

It’s the pressure on Marie’s heart.

“How in the world do you do it, Marie?” she’s already asked her a dozen times in the past week. “How do you keep standing upright?”

Marie knows how she does it and she explains it as if she is reciting a poem, as if she has died herself and seen something unlikely and yet terribly beautiful just as she crosses over the boulder of burden and sacrifice into the river of light and color.

“It is my call to life,” she tells Katherine. “It is my gift and to ignore it, to walk away from the rising passion that needs to be emptied out of me with each patient and then refilled with the next, well, that would be my call to dying.”

Katherine tries to imagine her work as the assistant district attorney as her own call to life. Mostly for the past several years it has been her ball and chain, the way she pays for the mortgage and a way to get health insurance. The legal lines under the nerves in her head have become dull and stagnant by what she sees as the ridiculous rules of life and justice that often result in no justice at all.

No justice for the woman she represented who was blinded by an ex-husband who kept her locked in the trunk of his car for three days and then bashed in her head with a baseball bat. No justice for at least three men she knows who were in prison for crimes they did not commit. No justice for all the kids she had to send to juvenile jail who maybe just needed a warm meal, someone to say something to them besides “fuck you,” and no justice for the helplessness she often feels when there is nothing she can do, absolutely nothing she can do.

When Katherine thinks like this, she realizes that there is a heavy hand on her heart. When she stops to think about her life, closes her eyes and tilts her head back in the terribly uncomfortable office chair that does not accommodate her long legs, the length of her five-foot-ten-inch frame, what she realizes is that she is on automatic pilot and that perhaps it is only the speed of light, the direction of her travel, the air that is holding her up. Perhaps she needs a change.

While Marie hangs up and tends to her dying patients, Katherine waits in the bar for the rest of the funeral procession members to arrive and she tries to imagine what would bring her passion at this point in her life—excluding, of course, the magic hands of her lover Alex and that first sip of wine after a twelve-hour day. What would she do if she erased every mark in her overworked Palm Pilot? If she cleared through the trash of her timetables, what would really be left?

“I’m stumped,” she tells herself out loud as a school group on an airport tour parades past her making more noise than the airplane she will board in two hours and she turns just in time to see the bartender balancing something on her head. “What’s become of me?” Katherine asks, putting her own head in her hands and laughing. “Airport bars. Waiting for a traveling funeral to begin, kids in jeans trying to see who can make the loudest burp. This is living.”

She says this with a smile and with the budding hope that something she has missed, something she may have forgotten, something she desperately wants to see again is just behind her left shoulder. Katherine thinks of her mother for a moment, how the simple routines of her mother’s life were the grounding points that kept her balanced. How her days unfolded in seemingly uneventful moments—waking her children, making breakfast, volunteering in the school library, staying up until Katherine waltzed in at one
A.M.,
which was two hours past curfew, folding towels while she watched the noon news, driving to the city to have lunch with her father twice a week, balancing a checkbook on one fairly modest income. The routine of her mother’s life had always mystified Katherine.

Once, when Katherine had been particularly snotty about how other mothers had real jobs and how she would never be caught dead ironing a man’s shirts or how her life would have much more meaning than scrubbing floors every Friday morning, her mother sent her to her room and then summoned her out an hour later with something that Katherine still considers remarkable but surely did not at the moment it was happening.

“Sit down,” her mother ordered after she led her back to the kitchen table. “Sit down, Katherine, and listen.”

Katherine listened. She listened while her mother told her that the kitchen table was her office desk and that everything she saw in the house was her business territory. She listened while her mother rolled out a piece of paper that was her associate’s degree from the local business college and she listened when her mother talked about life choices and how everyone’s call to service was different.

“My mother was a drunk,” Katherine heard her mother say. This was something so distant from what she had been led to believe about her grandmother that she dared not breathe. “I never told you this. I never told you how she locked me in my room and how I saw her crawling across the floor spattered with vomit or how I never once when I was a little girl had a hot meal, or clean clothes to wear, or someone to hold my hand and read me a story at night.”

Katherine remembers crying softly during the telling of this story so that she would not make a sound, so that her mother would go on and unwrap the secret that she had kept locked inside of herself for such a long time.

“Once,” her mother told her, looking out the window that was above the kitchen sink, “once when I was locked in my room by an outside bolt that she had installed during a brief moment of sobriety, I heard my parents fighting and I stood on top of my dresser. I looked out my bedroom window and I saw our neighbor holding her daughter and twirling her in circles in the side yard. I saw that the little girl had on a new jacket and that her hair was braided and that her mother couldn’t stop smiling. Her mother was smiling and I dropped from the dresser into my bed of dirty sheets and I cried for so long that my eyes swelled shut.”