Driving With Dead People (21 page)

The summer after I graduated from Kenyon, Whitfield drove down to Elk Grove because his elderly mother owned a farm there and he was helping her sell it. He and I met at Bullard’s Drive-In but immediately went to Dad’s lake house instead. Dad was at Mammaw’s trailer in Florida, wining and dining his girlfriend, Laura, so Whitfield and I partook at Lake Hiawatha. We were having a wild powwow, clothes thrown all over the living room, when I heard a car pull into the driveway. Dad was home two days early!

We dressed—fast—and by the time Dad hit the doorway, we were sitting in the living room, Whitfield in a chair, me on the floor, pretending to have a conversation. My bra was unhooked, my Conair vibrator was shoved under Dad’s plaid recliner, and I was flushed and breathing hard. My legs were like noodles, but Dad was oblivious.

I introduced Dad to Whitfield. “Dad, this is the head of my department at Kenyon, Mr. Whitfield. You met him last spring.” Dad shook Whitfield’s hand and nodded. “His mom is selling property near Elk Grove,” I added, hoping that would keep Dad from suspecting that Whitfield was having sex with his daughter. Turned out, I needn’t have worried.

“Glad to see you,” Dad said. He walked into the kitchen and prepared three cups of homemade hot chocolate with miniature marshmallows bobbing on top. I sat in the living room watching the two of them sitting side by side with matching green-and-white mugs in their hands. The wrinkles on their foreheads and their soft tummies were a thwack to the side of my head.

What was I doing with Whitfield? He looked like my dad.

With that thought, I got all squirmy and grossed out. I excused myself, set my mug of cocoa on the kitchen counter, and went into the bathroom to rehook my bra. I looked at myself in the mirror. What the hell was wrong with me? The list was endless.

Whitfield and I said good-bye to Dad and drove back to Elk Grove. When I dropped him off at the only hotel in town, I saw his white-haired mother opening the curtains in their room and waving to him. Trying to find any dignity in the situation was hopeless.

After Whitfield left, I visited the Kilners, my family-away-from-family. We were watching
Ghostbusters
in the living room when a call came in. Julie’s younger sister Liz picked up the phone, grabbed a white pad of paper, and wrote down the details. When she hung up, she said, “Business calls, ladies.”

“Who’s dead?” I asked. Liz was the new undertaker at Kilner and Sons, having just earned her degree. She was also running for Mason County coroner.

“A guy from Harrisburg. I’m meeting them at the mortuary. You want to come?”

I was so excited. It had been years since I’d last played in the mortuary, and after the craziness with Whitfield, I needed some good, clean fun. I was going to see a dead body.

I glanced at Julie, who looked bored. “Will you come too?” I asked.

“I’m not gonna sit here by myself,” she said, pulling herself up off the couch. I could always count on Julie.

The three of us squeezed into the cab of Liz’s shiny black pickup and headed into town, smoking and laughing.

We pulled into the mortuary and Liz unlocked the doors. Julie and I turned on the lights and went into the office to find cookies. Ten minutes later an ambulance pulled up to the side of the building.

“Dead man on blacktop,” Julie yelled to Liz. They started laughing. I flinched.

“Are you gonna be able to handle this, Mo?” Liz asked.

“I think so,” I said.

“Don’t be a pussy,” she said, referring to the time I’d called her a pussy when she was only in fifth grade and refused to put her hands up in the air on the big roller coaster at Kings Island.

“I’m no pussy,” I said, but suddenly I wasn’t sure.

Liz walked outside and signed for the body. As I watched from the office window, the EMT helped her get the gurney into the body elevator.

I turned to Julie. “He’s coming down.”

“I’ll alert the
Elk Grove Courier
,” she said dryly.

“We can leave if you want to,” I said.

“I’m gonna call Jay on the office phone so we can have a long conversation for once.” Jay was Julie’s new boyfriend and he was a long distance call away. Julie’s phone bill was enormous and she’d been warned by Dave and Joan to cut down on “Jay” calls. She picked up the mortuary phone as I headed downstairs.

It took a lot of strength to lift the corpse onto the white porcelain embalming table, but I didn’t offer to help. I couldn’t bear to touch the man. Once they had him in position, the EMT pulled the gurney toward the elevator. The dead guy looked youngish, with black hair, and was wearing jeans and a blue-and-white flannel shirt. I imagined him sitting in front of his television watching
60 Minutes
and suddenly dropping like a stone.

“See ya, Liz,” the EMT yelled from the elevator.

“See ya,” Liz hollered back.

“Do you want to undress him, Mo?” she asked, winking at me.

“No thanks,” I said. “I can get that action on any corner in Elk Grove.” I walked out and sat on the steps. It wasn’t dignified to watch a dead man being undressed.

A few minutes later she yelled, “He’s naked, Mo.”

“I’m on my way,” I said, walking back into the room.

He was naked all right, except for a white terry cloth towel covering his crotch. He looked too young to be dead, but he definitely looked dead. His skin was a yellowish bruised color, his eyes were shut but sunken, and his fingernails were blue.

Liz put on a white plastic apron and threw one to me.

“Am I gonna get shit on me?” I asked, worried.

“You never know, Mo. Be prepared for anything,” she said, giving me the two-fingers-over-the-eyebrow Girl Scout salute.

Liz enjoyed torturing me. She pushed a button on the boom box sitting on the shelf behind her, and AC/DC’s “Back in Black” started playing. I loved “Back in Black,” it helped me relax, but I looked at the guy on the table and wondered if the song was relaxing to him. He didn’t appear to be in his body. Still, I felt a little sorry that we were jamming.

Liz uncoiled a clear plastic hose and began spraying the body.

“Disinfectant,” she said, over the beginning drums of “Back in Black.” I nodded as if I’d always known that morticians sprayed humans with disinfectant.

I wasn’t going to freak out. I’d waited more than eleven years to finally have a look at what Max had been doing behind the big wooden doors. I wasn’t going to blow it now. It might be my last chance.

After Liz sprayed the disinfectant, she didn’t dry him off. I knew it wasn’t irritating his nose or stinging his eyes, but I still wondered.

Once he was hosed down, Liz lifted his heavy head onto the head-block and crossed his stiff, thick hands over his stomach, hand over hand.

“Once they’re embalmed, you can’t move ’em,” Liz explained. “I make sure everything’s in place before the formaldehyde gets into the tissues.” I nodded.

Liz held up two plastic discs. “These are going under the eyelids,” she warned. “Can you deal?”

“I’m good,” I said, wondering what a dead person’s eyes looked like. I guess you could no longer see their souls through their eyes, since their souls had, hopefully, departed to a “better place.”

AC/DC started singing.
Back in black, I hit the sack, I’ve been too long I’m glad to be back.
Liz rubbed cream onto the eye caps, opened the man’s eyelids, and placed one on top of each eye so quickly, I couldn’t see his actual eyes. When the eyelid folded back over it, his eyes weren’t sunken anymore.

“Amazing,” I said, pulling up a metal stool, my stomach less tight. The plastic eye caps helped depersonalize the embalming. This was a job with tricks and tools, just like any other job—only there was a large naked dead man lying there.

I wondered who he was. He looked to be around forty, so I imagined his parents were still living. Who’d called them tonight?
I’ve been looking at the sky, ’Cause it’s gettin’ me high, Forget the hearse ’cause I never die.

“What killed him?” I asked.

“Heart attack,” Liz said.

“How old is he?” I asked.

“Forty-three,” she said. He was Whitfield’s exact age, and in much better shape than Whitfield.

Liz took a piece of suture string with a curved needle and stuck it through his lower gums. Then she pulled it up through his upper gums, right through his nostril, crossed it over to the other nostril, and threaded it back down through the gums on the other side. I was slapping the top of my thighs and squirming on the stool.

“What the hell, Liz?” I gasped.

“Can’t handle it?” she asked.

“You’re never doing that to me,” I said. “It looks beyond painful.”

“Doesn’t it?” Liz smiled.

“If I die, you can play AC/DC, but you can’t stick a needle through my nose.” I silently contemplated cremation.

“I’m setting his mouth,” she said, adding a plastic mouth former under his lips, using white cream to hold it in place. She rubbed a clear wax on the outside of his lips to keep them from cracking. His mouth was done.

I had a headache.

“Back in Black” was over and the four bells at the beginning of “Hells Bells” were chiming.

Liz dumped two plastic bottles of chemicals into the glass embalming machine that looked like a Waring blender with a clear hose attached. AC/DC sang:
My lightning’s flashing across the sky, You’re only young but you’re gonna die.

She took a scalpel and held it up for me to see. I gave her the thumbs-up and she cut a small incision in the man’s shoulder near his collarbone and used a small metal hook to pull up an artery and a vein. After cutting through both, she inserted a tube into the artery and another tube into the vein. The hose in the artery was attached to the embalming machine. When Liz switched the machine on, embalming fluid gurgled and pumped into the artery, forcing blood he would never need again to drain out of his veins. The reddish maroon liquid emptied into a canal along the edge of the embalming table, and then swirled into a drain below.

Within a few minutes his skin took on a peach-colored hue and his blue fingernails turned pink. It was magical and unsettling.

Liz stitched the artery and vein closed, pushed them back into his shoulder, and stitched up the incision.

I was less than twelve inches from the body. It was so shocking that I felt detached—floaty.

“You’ll love this,” she said, picking up a long metal tube with sharp blades on the end. The other end was connected to a hose. She held it up. “Cavity treatment.” She grinned.

“I’m very afraid,” I said.

She pierced the skin by his belly button and poked the metal tube inside, jabbing around inside him. A suctioning sound rose above AC/DC. It was the same sound I’d heard coming from behind that door through all the years I’d sat outside this room.

“What are you doing?” I asked in horror.

“Draining the organs. If you don’t, gases build up, and you know what happens then,” she said, and laughed. “Explosion.”

She inserted the metal prong back into his body, filling the organs with special cavity fluid. When she was done, I swear she took a plastic screw and screwed it right into the hole by his belly button. I couldn’t believe it. Again, cremation for me.

She hosed down the body to clean him off.

I stood up and stared at him. He looked peaceful, and yet he’d been through hell.

I’d been right, even when I was in fourth grade and saw Sarah Keeler lying in her coffin: When you’re dead, no one can hurt you.

I had a new respect for Liz Kilner after seeing what she had to do every day. She was no longer just Julie’s little sister; she was strong, unflinching, and, best of all, a certified mortician.

A few weeks later, before I left for California, Julie and I drove to Kenyon so I could say good-bye to Whitfield. He and I had one last fling in the costume storage attic, but when we walked out the back door of the theatre, his wife was walking in, pushing a baby carriage. Whitfield flew into full panic mode. He mumbled something and ran back into the building, leaving me standing there with his wife.

I was appropriately mortified as I excused myself. He called me later that day to say everything was okay. He told his wife that I’d confessed to being in love with him and he had turned me down. For a moment I envied that guy on the table at Kilners. It was my turn to hang up on him.

Suddenly, change didn’t scare me like it had before. I was looking forward to the four-hour plane ride that would separate me from Ohio and expose me to the West Coast. After twenty-one years of dead bodies, bad choices, and lousy love affairs, I was finally getting out.

I was leaving for California.

The University of California, San Diego, sat on the bluffs of La Jolla, overlooking the ocean. I’d never seen anything as mesmerizing as the sun setting over that water. I met the nine other actors in my program and we stuck together that first week. None of us were from San Diego, so we rode our bikes to the cliffs every night during the first month, to do what would never become routine for me: watching the round orange sun dipping into the luminous Pacific Ocean.

In our first acting class our teacher, Stanley Brooks, who was a genius and the reason we were all sitting there, talked about the importance of courage in acting. The next day for our acting scenes, four out of the ten of us came out completely naked. I was not one of them. It hadn’t even occurred to me. I decided right then to get my body into really good shape—just in case parading around naked was part of graduate school.

I talked to Stanley.

“I’m not courageous enough to be nude.”

“You don’t have to be nude to be brave,” he assured me.

“I’m not sure I’m brave at all.”

“What do you want to be?” he said.

“I want to be normal,” I answered. I was done with eccentric and reckless.

“How about being strong,” he suggested. “I can get you into a weight-lifting program where you could start exercising your body. You’ll be surprised how strength on the outside focuses you inside, and vice versa.”

Weights were torture. I couldn’t lift them for very long without my spaghetti arms giving out on me.

I cursed at my trainer. “Why the fuck am I doing this?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. I was holding up a two-pound weight, saying, “Is this really fucking necessary? Damn. This is killing me.”

I hated my trainer and I hated how I felt afterward, sore and exhausted. Stanley assured me this was “normal.”

He was right; I became strong. I now had the stamina to run three miles, as opposed to three feet into the door of the 7-Eleven for a Big Gulp.

Strangely, whenever things slowed down at school, which wasn’t often, I would be nudged by that dark depression and fear I’d fought in Ohio. It crept in when I was singing alone at the piano, or followed me across campus at night when I was positive I’d be raped or strangled, though there were plenty of lights on and other students around.

I was happier than I’d ever been, with friends and teachers who stimulated and excited me, and yet that feeling of dread was right at my back.

Partly to avoid that feeling, I bought a motorcycle. I fantasized that it would be difficult to be depressed with salt air blowing around my body and sunshine warming my knuckles as I sped along the sandy rim of the Pacific. Plus, I was in desperate need of transportation since everything in southern California was so spread out. I could actually afford it. My student loan finally arrived, so I had enough money—four hundred dollars.

It was an aqua blue Honda 250. Small enough to be safe, big enough to be hip. It was fun as hell too. I drove it along the Pacific Coast Highway with my newly blond-highlighted, shoulder-length hair blowing out the back of my white helmet.

When I bought it, I’d imagined myself speeding by in a cool black leather jacket, pants, and hip boots, but those things were expensive. Instead, I looked like a homeless person layering on everything I owned—a red hooded sweatshirt under my green wool sweater with an orange wool scarf wrapped around my throat that Granda had sent me. I pulled thick pink sweatpants on under my yellow peasant skirt to protect my legs from the chill and the hot metal pipe.

At stoplights I happily pulled up my face guard and breathed in the salt air.

I usually had one of the other actors riding with me. One afternoon I pulled out of a deli on La Jolla Village Drive with my friend Madeline on the back, but when I got to campus at the top of the hill, she was no longer back there. I sped back down, arriving just as she was stepping onto the curb. The macaroni salad I’d asked her to hold for me was splattered on the front of her.

“I slid off the back when you tore off,” she said, picking macaroni noodles off her denim jacket.

“I’m sorry, Maddie,” I said, pulling up next to her. I stifled a laugh.

“No, don’t you laugh. You aren’t allowed to laugh,” she said.

“I’m really sorry,” I managed to sputter out, again.

“If you hadn’t needed this stupid salad, I would have been hanging on to
you
instead of
it
, and I wouldn’t have fallen off,” she concluded.

“Bad choice on my part,” I said.

“My ass is going to be killing me now.”

“I’ll go slower.”

“I’ll hang on this time,” she said, swinging her leg over the seat.

That first summer at UCSD, Dad flew to Los Angeles with the Shriners and took a train to San Diego to visit me. I watched as his train pulled into the San Diego Amtrak station, and among the passengers climbing off were fifty middle-aged men wearing maroon fezzes. Dad was one of them. I could see him waving at me from the middle of the crowd.

I’d rented a tiny car because I’d thought it would be just the two of us. He’d forgotten to mention that he was bringing his girlfriend, Laura, my dad’s uncle Warren, and his wife, my great-aunt Caroline. I offered to trade my little rental for a bigger one, but they said it would be fine as they squeezed into the white Ford Escort, shoulder overlapping shoulder. Being Shriners, riding in tiny cars must have been second nature to them. We were on our way.

I was anxious driving. It was the first time I’d been in a car with Dad when he wasn’t behind the wheel. Also, I wasn’t familiar with the layout of San Diego, having spent most of my time on campus, but Hertz had given me a map. I’d circled places I thought they might enjoy.

Laura and Aunt Caroline picked Old Town San Diego. It turned out to be a good choice, not only because it was beautiful, with the sparkling white Hacienda Hotel and purple and pink bougainvillea draped on almost every porch, but because we sat down to the most delicious lunch—enchiladas and margaritas. I was starving, and the margarita helped me relax.

“There are no bugs on the windshields out here,” Dad said.

“There aren’t any bugs anywhere.”

“There are cockroaches in my apartment,” I said.

“Oh, Monica, get yourself some Black Flag spray, honey,” Laura said. She was always offering good and caring advice.

“Back home, I’m scraping bugs off my windshield every day,” Dad reiterated. “I don’t get it.”

“There are a lot of bugs back there,” Uncle Warren agreed.

“What degree are you getting, Monica?” Aunt Caroline asked.

“Master of fine arts,” I said.

“Oh, your master’s. That’s great.” Aunt Caroline was a celebrated schoolteacher back home and appreciated education.

As we toured the “Birthplace of California,” Dad took the map to figure out our next stop. “How about La Jolla Cove?” He pronounced the
J
, just like I had at first.

“It’s gorgeous,” I said. “There are sea lions sleeping in squirmy piles on the sand.”

We squeezed back into the Escort and headed up Interstate 5. I missed the La Jolla exit three times in a row and thought Dad would be furious, but he was busy filming out the passenger window with his Super 8 movie camera. “These idiots out here build houses right on the side of a hill,” he said, indicating a pink house built on stilts, the foundation sticking out over the side of the mountain. “The whole damn thing’s gonna fall,” he said, shaking his head.

“But if one does fall, you’ll get some good footage,” I said.

When we got to the cove, Laura and Aunt Caroline wanted to see the shops, and Uncle Warren and Dad lay down on a patch of grass with the dazzling Pacific Ocean spread out before them.

I wanted to stay with Dad, but the ladies convinced me to go with them. There were tacky, expensive galleries and clothing stores in La Jolla and I felt out of place in my Kmart khaki shorts, but we laughed and had fun.

By the time we met back at the cove, it was almost time to head back to the train station.

“Can we drive up the hill so I can show you my school?” I asked.

“Sure,” Laura said. I drove up curvy Torrey Pines Road, but we were so packed into the car that no one’s head even moved. I showed them the theatre department and the La Jolla Playhouse, where I’d been understudying all summer. We swung by my apartment building and I pointed to my balcony. My motorcycle was sitting in front of it.

“That’s a good way to get yourself killed,” Dad said.

“What is?” I asked.

“That motorcycle. It’s a death machine.” He glanced at my apartment. “Pretty nice,” he said, but he didn’t film it.

“And cheap,” I told him as we sped off.

Dad didn’t know the motorcycle was mine. Older people were scared of new things, but I wasn’t going to let him scare me. I was embracing change.

We arrived at the train station just in time.

As I watched them pull out, that depression began creeping in again. Their train rumbled away just as another one was pulling in. I had an unexpected urge to step right in front of the oncoming train. The impulse was so strong and sudden that I sat down on a stone bench to protect myself from stepping onto the tracks.

Once that train stopped and began unloading passengers, I jumped up and hurried to the Escort. My heart was racing and it was difficult to breath. In fact, breathing made my chest hurt worse. I climbed into the car and laid my seat down. I tried to slow my breathing, but I couldn’t. I felt light-headed and my vision was blurry. I worried I was having a heart attack. After about ten minutes my heart rate started slowing down and my head felt clearer. I was drenched in sweat.

I needed to get to Hertz, so I pulled onto Interstate 5.

When I told my friend Madeline what had happened, she said I’d had a panic attack. I’d thought panic attacks were what occurred when I thought I had a twenty-dollar bill in my wallet but couldn’t find it when I was next at the checkout counter. I didn’t think it was my heart practically exploding out of my chest.

What had provoked it? I was happy now. Why was I still so fucked up?

That winter Mom called. Jamie had had a serious accident. He was rock climbing in Utah and fell thirty feet off the side of a mountain. He broke his back, his wrists, and his pelvis. I assumed he was either drunk or stoned at the time. When I talked to him later, he confirmed he was both, saying, “I didn’t even know I was fallin’ until I hit the ground. If I hadn’t been so relaxed, I woulda killed myself.” If he hadn’t been so messed up, he wouldn’t have plunged in the first place, but that was lost on him.

Jamie was—not so passively—trying to get himself killed. Every broken bone represented a time when he felt too stupid or worthless or sad. His two front teeth were chipped, and his nose, which had been broken several times already, was broken again. Jamie was a tenderhearted person, but when he drank, he became so violent that I knew he was capable of hurting one of us. My darling brother was in pieces.

In an uncharacteristic moment of compassion, Becky flew out to help Jamie. He reciprocated by getting drunk and sawing off his own casts with a handsaw and threatening her with a hunting knife. That was the first and last time Becky ever became the cavalry for any of us.

I vowed to continue becoming stronger. I wasn’t going to let the “You’re a hopeless loser” tsunami that pounded and enraged Jamie catch up with me. I would stay ahead of it until I was strong enough to face it—whatever “it” was.

Dave and Joan Kilner sent me a plane ticket to fly home for Julie’s wedding. She was marrying “long-distance Jay” and wanted me to be her maid of honor.

I was a terrible maid of honor. I had no idea that I should have thrown her a shower and taken care of all kinds of things. I was poor, living on a tiny school loan, some of which I’d used for my motorcycle, and I was three thousand miles away from her until the night before the wedding. I barely got there in time for the rehearsal. She deserved someone who knew what they were doing. But I stood up with Julie, who looked angelic in her wedding gown, and watched her marry someone I barely knew.

She had a Catholic wedding, and when the priest handed her the chalice of wine, she sucked down every last drop with a loud
sssllluurrpp
sound at the end. There was none left for Jay. This sent us into unfortunate hysterics. Joan said all she could see were our shoulders moving up and down, as she sat in the pew and panicked.