Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (4 page)

When her mother stirs and then moans out loud, Katherine still remembers. She remembers giving birth to her own daughter and how her mother stood at the window in the hospital and told her, “Now you know,” without ever saying a word. She remembers how just after the baby was born her mother would simply show up on the bad days without a call—and how on those days they would enjoy a small glass of wine with lunch and then maybe another glass in the middle of the afternoon and how Katherine thought she was losing her mind because she had no idea what she was doing, how to raise a baby, how to some days even rise off her own bed. She remembers how her mother walked through the reception line after she received her law degree and leaned to say, “I never ever doubted you for one moment since the day you were born.”

She remembers the day her mother came to her to tell her that she was dying. The way, even then, her mother was there so she could lean against her and how then suddenly, everything changed in the next sentence.

“I need you now,” her mother told her. “I need you like I have never needed anyone, and you have to help me. Be who you are now, baby, be who I taught you to be. This is not going to be easy and I am going to have to lean into you.”

And she did. Katherine remembers that the leaning began immediately and she remembers every second of the doctor visits and then the day her mother could not eat and the day her mother could not walk and the day her mother could no longer talk and they brought her to the hospice, and then she knows that she will remember these last moments with her mother every single day for the rest of her own life.

“Katherine . . .” her mother choked into her ear, just the word “Katherine . . .” and it is enough, it will be enough to get her through the next day and the day after that and the day her mother died and the funeral and the months and days after that and then this—this remembering as Jill finds her own safe place on the porch floor.

Always remembering.

They talk then, Jill and Katherine, about the traveling funeral and just a bit about loss and making plans and how bizarre it will be to finally meet each other in person and how they hope they can find their way and Annie’s way and how they hope everyone else can go, and then when Jill is settled, it’s time to make the next call.

Jill reassures Katherine that she will be fine, eventually she has to be fine, that something inside of her has slipped loose and that perhaps the traveling funeral will help her move the knots of her life a bit tighter—or not.

“Maybe not,” Jill says, pushing the blanket around her own face. “Maybe that is not what will happen at all.”

Katherine knows what she means. She knows that women who have climbed through a large chunk of their lives are always wise enough to realize that certainty equals uncertainty.

“You know what they say,” she says, looking into the edges of the night that have come to rest outside her own porch.

“What’s that, Katherine the great attorney who saved Annie Freeman all those years ago? What do they say?”

Before she answers, Katherine bends down to pick up her bra. She throws it over her shoulder and then hangs on to the end with her left hand like a baby would hold on to a blankie that was tattered and had been dragged through grocery stores, libraries, Grandma’s house and thirteen neighborhood backyards.

“They say funerals are for the living.”

The calls to the three other women continue at odd intervals because of time zones and Katherine’s need to rush out at the crack of dawn for fresh coffee and then her realization that she has to quickly call in sick, which she has done only twice in the past two years, and have her clerk reschedule everything on her calendar that day. Maybe more—but first just this one day. And maybe the world will fall apart because Katherine Givins missed a day of work, was late, turned left instead of right. But Katherine manages to make the calls anyway.

What is remarkable, beyond the fact that she does every single thing without her Bali bra, is that there is no hesitation. None. Just delicious movements of precision because there really isn’t that much to do—Annie has done almost everything as Annie has always wanted to do and she surely wants to do this more than anything she can remember or imagine. It is as if there is no choice. As if someone or something else has decided and Katherine is just filling the order like the fine waitress she was back in college when she worked until two
A.M.
and dreamed of calling her clerk—this moment—and saying, “I won’t be in.”

“I won’t be in.”

5

Jill and Annie

Sonoma, California, 1978

Jill Matchney hears the new assistant professor coming before she sees her. Boots clicking against the tile floors in the long hallway outside her office door. Hesitation. The sound of someone breathing quickly—deep breaths from that spot just below a breastbone. A longer pause. She must be looking out the windows, thinking about what to say, what it will be like, what this next step into this next part of her world will be like.

“Perhaps the protégé I have been waiting for all these years,” Professor Jill Jacobs Matchney says to herself while she waits for the required knock. “Perhaps.”

Hand selected, recruited, interviewed ad nauseam, Annie G. Freeman was the number one choice of every single member of the interviewing committee, and she was offered a salary and a position higher than anyone her age, anyone with her years of experience and surely anyone with her saucy attitude—which is precisely why Professor Matchney wanted her.

“If we want to move forward, if we want to attract the dollars and the attention that a university needs to bring in the top students, leaders, community support and faculty members, then we need a dozen Annie G. Freemans,” she declared, standing with her hands on the oak table in the chancellor’s office and her mind stretching to the future. “This woman has drive, talent, charisma and fabulous academic credentials.”

Professor Matchney got her Annie Freeman and now—now—would be the true test. Could Annie Freeman carry it off?

“Lock the door,” Matchney told Freeman that very first day, “and please come into my private office.”

Professor Matchney had dismissed her assistant early and had notified the switchboard to hold her calls. She had canceled her evening appointment with her friends at the bookstore and she was willing to stay as long as it took.

Assistant Professor Annie G. Freeman moved past her mentor quickly and then stopped suddenly, which surprised Professor Matchney. The two women faced each other, close enough to kiss, and Annie G. Freeman put her hand on the professor’s arm, in that long stretch below the shoulder and before the elbow, and she grabbed her firm and long.

“Thank you for hiring me,” Annie Freeman said with such directness that the professor was startled and lost that place in her mind, her bookmark, that would have allowed her to see the next page, the next thought, the next word that she must utter clearly.

“Thank you?”

“Oh, yes!”

Jill Matchney cannot speak. She already knows she has made the proper decision. This close to Annie Freeman, she sees a spark the size of a boulder simmering behind the younger woman’s eyes.

“I wanted to work with you,” Annie Freeman tells her. “You are the reason I am here.”

“Just me?”

“I didn’t apply anywhere else. I have read everything you have ever written. I’ve interviewed your students, talked to former professors, examined every thesis and document produced by the department in the past three years, and I’ve made myself physically ill worrying about this meeting, this first day, my professional introduction.”

Professor Matchney smiles. She wants to laugh out loud but she imagines her new protégé would be frightened, even with her obvious bold spirit, by a laugh just now. She can feel a tremble right where the assistant professor’s fingers touch the edge of her shirt and nudge into her skin. “I’m flattered.”

“Thank you.”

“Please, then, sit down. We have much to discuss.”

“Wait, please.”

The professor has turned away but when she hears the request, she turns back to face the assistant professor. “What is it? Are you all right?”

“I need to ask you something. It may seem ridiculous but I have to ask it. The question and several following it—well, I just have to ask them.”

Jill Matchney is now perplexed. She cannot imagine what this bright, wise, attractive, challenging young professor could be worried about. She cannot imagine what is keeping her from moving from the spot on the floor of her office where her own feet have become frozen. She cannot wait to hear the question.

“Of course,” she responds. “Of course.”

Annie G. Freeman drops her hands. She grabs them, one holding the other as if she were holding something delicate that still needed to breathe.

“Will you help me?” she asks.

“Help you?” Jill Matchney responds so quickly she barely realizes she has spoken.

“Yes, help me. It may sound foolish but I want you to help me. I do not want to be challenged irresponsibly like I have been at other universities by self-righteous, pompous senior professors. I do not want to be tricked. I don’t want to have to stand on my head to get promoted or to get stuck teaching only the night classes. I want to be mentored and trained and I’d like to stay here forever.”

The negotiations continued for hours. There was no begging or pleading, only an honest and raw discussion between teacher and student, mentor and trainee, soon-to-be comrades, focused talents.

In the end Professor Jill Matchney agreed to help Assistant Professor Annie G. Freeman, and the agreement, an unwritten set of directions, an intersecting diagram that covered parallel and yet totally distinct ways of life, became a shared heartbeat, an enlarged passion, and a bond between two women that lasted until the very day one of them died and then beyond that moment, even beyond that moment.

6

Laura has had one of those feelings all day. It’s that “looking over your shoulder because you think someone is watching you” kind of feeling. It’s that “something’s going to happen” kind of feeling that has her remembering what she looked like in the morning and how she felt after lunch and the face of the man at the last corner before the post office, because one of those things, maybe two or three or fourteen of those damn things, will be a significant reminder for whatever is winging its way toward her on this particular day when her hands and mind and every single thing about her will not, could not, cannot stay still.

When she was young, Laura knew things. She knew the exact time—almost—her father would arrive at home each evening, and she would always be there, sitting on the steps—even in the dead of winter—to greet him. She even knew his ever-changing seemingly startled response: “There’s my baby” or “Look, someone left a package on the doorstep,” or “Wow, someone is shooting a commercial and there’s a model on the doorstep” or mostly just, “Hi, baby doll.”

Not just that for all these years, but other things too. Important things. Knowing when to stop just before an accident occurred at the bridge. Staying home and then the call comes. Turning left to see that sunset—waves of light, brilliant colors that make people stop and rush into Kmart to purchase a camera. Touching the woman in line at Albertson’s who came to the grocery store wearing her loneliness like a new hat just so someone would do that—simply touch her. Closing her eyes and seeing people she has never met, does not know except for the certain feeling that they exist. Seeing their faces, the color of their hair, the way they walk their dogs, how they forage for food, the way they tilt their heads slightly to the left just before a kiss—in places so distant they are barely dots on the international maps she keeps in her small bedroom office.

“Crap,” Laura says to no one in particular at 8:29
P.M
. when she steps into her dark kitchen and hears the phone ringing.

Laura has to answer it. It doesn’t matter what the caller ID says. The ID could be wrong. It may not be Wells Fargo but instead some voice from the past that connects her to a lost fortune of feelings. It could be a wrong number that turns into a conversation that is as enlightening as anything she has ever experienced. It could be her wayward and often missing prodigal daughter Erin reporting in from Belize or Kentucky or Tokyo or wherever in the hell she has landed this particular week. It is most likely not her husband or the neighbor who is tending to her dying father. But it could be anyone else. Absolutely anyone. Laura has this feeling, this twinge in the center of her quivering stomach, that tells her in a warm rumble that moves there to the center of her mind to the edge of the hand that she must pick up the phone, that to not answer the phone would be beyond a mistake.

It is a woman’s voice. One that she has heard at only a distance as an echo behind another voice. One that has paced through her mind constantly for the past three days so that Laura was certain she was about to see or meet or in some way encounter the very woman who owned the voice. One that she would not recognize until she hears the voice say the name “Katherine Givins” and Laura can then recall a long-ago conversation, the mention of this name many times, and that echo of sound.

“It’s Katherine Givins,” the woman says, then hesitates, and Laura Westma, forty-nine years old, who lives in a tiny bungalow in a suburb just barely north of downtown Chicago with her husband, a cat and all of her wandering and often missing daughter’s possessions, sits down abruptly because she is suddenly lost in a swirl of memories, vivid, wide, and so consuming that they make her lose her balance. Laura who has hair cropped so close to her head she is often mistaken for a short man who likes to wear pressed jeans and turtlenecks well into summer and who refuses to wear makeup and who walks with such determination people who don’t know her think she is perpetually angry. Laura with her eighty-hour workweeks as the director of the women’s center and her fund-raisers and the very old and increasingly heavy weight of the knowledge that there is never going to be enough time, enough money, enough anything to save everyone, including herself and especially her daughter.

“Annie.”

She forms the name with her mouth but she does not say it out loud. Instead she begins a conversation that she knows is taking her someplace. She knows that already but she does not know where or how but only the why just this moment. It is because of Annie Freeman. It is because of Annie’s death. It is because of some unique and marvelous connection that she and Katherine Givins shared for years and years.

“Katherine, how are you?”

“You remember me?”

“Annie talked about you all of the time. Once, I think we were just a few minutes from actually meeting each other as you were coming in from the airport in San Francisco and I was leaving,” Laura said.

“I remember. The boys were young. Annie had a mess of friends and relatives on a very unique schedule so we could all help her that year she was so sick.”

“So sick. Have you thought about that now?” Laura asks and then keeps on talking, already feeling certain that she may be onto something. “I have wondered if that illness all those years ago wasn’t the beginning of what happened to her when she got sick again. I have wondered if that kick started something inside of her that never left.”

Laura always talks as if she is in charge. She is used to phone-wrestling and to talking people up and down and to making certain that she is believed and trusted even if her own hand is on fire and she’s lost in an alley. It’s her job and it’s also her inner core.

“I think about things like that also. All of the time. It’s hard not to.”

“Are you okay?” Laura asks Katherine. “Can I do something?”

Katherine cannot help but laugh and the laugh startles Laura back into a standing position.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well, you can do something but you might not believe what I am about to ask you to do.”

The conversation turns a corner into lightness as Katherine reads the letter from Annie. Before the end of the first page Laura is also laughing. She wants to tell Katherine she is laughing because she has already imagined this moment or one so similar that one thought, one sentence, one echo on the phone could be mistaken for another.

“Stop,” she finally tells Katherine. “Isn’t this just like Annie? We should have seen this coming. It made sense that she didn’t want to have a formal funeral. She hated that shit. I imagine she wanted the boys to spread her ashes around the backyard of that house she loved so damn much. But this? This is classic. It’s perfect. It’s . . .”

Laura stops. She has already spread out the traveling funeral in her mind. She’s already formed pieces of the trip that stretch like banners into the lives of the other women, the people they meet, their conversations after midnight, the way they fall into each other without hesitation, the way some of them don’t like each other at first or wrestle for attention, the way they manage to finally fit the curves of their personalities into each other so the puzzle is complete, the way they will change. She feels the emotional water of the traveling funeral washing over her and she knows, she thinks she knows, why Annie wanted them to do this. But she stops herself. She doesn’t want to know everything and she has that power also. She can let it ride.

“Hey . . .” Katherine says, a little puzzled by Laura’s silence.

“I’m okay. Just thinking about what this is going to be like.”

There is another pause and Laura thinks that there are so many things that she doesn’t know for sure. She doesn’t know when she will see her daughter again. She doesn’t know if she can save every woman at the shelter. She doesn’t know how she can afford to take a short leave of unpaid absence, because she and her husband live on such a tight budget that one unplanned trip, one traveling funeral, one real funeral, and the whole budget is shot to hell. But she also doesn’t know how she could not go. It is an impossible possibility, but possibility to Laura is everything.

“Let me finish reading first,” Katherine says. “Then we’ll discuss the rest of the details.”

Laura listens and then, right after Katherine begins speaking again, she remembers the spiral notebook that Annie kept with her the last time they saw each other. It was not so long ago, just four weeks before Annie died, weeks ago—just weeks ago when she saw her last.

The notebook never left Annie’s hands. She placed it on her lap the few times she managed to sit outside on the deck, set her fingers on top of it, resting her palms on the metal spiral edges when it rested on her chest while she lay in bed, moved it under her elbow when she managed just once or twice to shift to her side, pushed it under her pillow each and every time she fell asleep.

“What is it?” Laura had asked Annie. “Are you working on something?”

Annie looked at Laura as if she were trying to see right through her. She moved her hand so two fingers rested on the side of her leg.

“I’m always working on something, you know that. Right now I’m trying to figure out a way to forge a gentle exit but I’m having a hell of a time, sweetheart. This wasn’t part of the plan. Not at all.”

“Can I do something?”

“If I could laugh I would,” Annie had said, smiling just a little. “You’ve already done enough and when the time comes you will know if there is one more thing that you can do. You’ll know. Just having you here now for this time is good. It’s good, sweetheart.”

Laura had looked hard at Annie then. She saw how her dark eyes were rimmed with even darker circles. She reached over and brushed Annie’s brown hair, laced with occasional loops of silver, away from her weary eyes. She noticed how the lines across the top of Annie’s mouth and under her eyes and descending from her lower lip had suddenly grown longer, wider, deeper. She saw how the arms and hands and fingers and legs and every inch of her beloved Annie had melted away so that her bones had become dominant features.

“Goddamn cancer,” she’d said to herself. “Goddamn fucking cancer.”

Ovarian fucking cancer. Such a secret disease. This tiny pain in Annie’s stomach. First quiet, and then more and more insistent. Then one day when Laura finally pays attention Annie is by the fountain in the center of campus, doubled over with the constant pain, and she cannot move. Annie eats an apple and feels as if she has swallowed a turkey whole. Pounds dropping away as if she has been injected with Mr. Atkins personally. Blood, tiny drops the color of a Wisconsin sunset in early fall, moving from her vagina when she is not even close to her period and then days of it and then the look on the doctor’s face when she tells her all of this, when Annie G. Freeman lines up all of her symptoms and the doctor says nothing for a moment, then calls the hospital, and Annie G. Freeman does not go home that night or for many nights after that.

There are quick calls from the hospital. The network is alerted. Katherine, Annie’s two sons, Jill, Laura, neighbors, the assistant who will cancel classes. Quick calls and the feeling that the doctor already knows something.

The doctor with the gentle eyes and hands that glide like only a female doctor’s hands can glide. A female doctor who knows what it is like to have objects the size of a toaster oven inserted into a vagina. A doctor who knows that the soft placing of a hand on a knee or arm or even on the side of a worried face before an examination can make a woman feel safe and protected. The hands of a doctor that take their time and move slowly with the orchestrated sounds of a female voice. The assurance and that kind voice of knowing because she has been there, felt that, winced at the exact same moment when something so unnatural moves into a natural place.

The doctor who tells you, “Yes, I will be honest.” And “No, there is no way to know for sure,” and “Maybe it will be okay,” and then, “Maybe it will not.”

The female doctor who tells her secretary, “Please hold my calls and cancel my last three appointments.” The doctor who says this because she gives a damn. The doctor who gives a damn beyond what the HMO tells her to do and the doctor who knows it takes more than fifteen minutes to tell a woman she may have a form of cancer that will kill her. She may have a form of cancer that has already pawed its way past her absolutely fabulous ovaries. The same ovaries that helped her generate two of the most remarkable sons on the face of the earth. The same ovaries that pelted her with cramps and made her drop to her knees in bathrooms throughout the continental United States and in five foreign countries. The same ovaries that she doubted when she was thirteen years old because half of her friends already had their periods and her menstrual cycle was just getting cranked up. The same ovaries that claimed her as “woman” and made her want so desperately to feel things she would never have felt without them—rising tides, the glance of a handsome man, the yearning to touch the tiny hairs on the head of her own baby, the salt from the tears of her best woman friend, the warm ashes from a fire that kept her warm for days and nights along the shores of Lake Superior, the scent of lust rising from inside of her own skin, the desperate need to always say yes.