Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (4 page)

I first met her in biology. We dissected a fetal pig together. I did n't expect to like her because I saw who her friends were. They wore Grateful Dead shirts and leather strips around their ankles, Birkenstocks and cut-off jeans; their heads nodded as they walked. They dropped acid and skipped along the bluffs over the Missouri, sold dope to fraternity boys, stared holes into the tables at Taco Bell.

"I know you," she said, snipping open the bag and filling the air between us with the smell of formaldehyde. "You're the shyest boy in the school."

I got an A on the lab, my first, and found myself saying things to her that I had never told anyone. We went to my favorite deli and bought sandwiches—roast beef on rye with cole slaw and Russian dressing—cut along the Katy Trail to my house where we watched the soaps, drinking sixteen-ounce Dr Peppers with a big bag of Doritos. We must have done that every day for months and into the summer, slumped with our backs against the sofa on the plush orange rug in the living room. I felt my elbow on her waist and I held it there, pressing against her until it seemed dangerous.

She was tall, from her father—we stood eye to eye—long-limbed and willowy. Her light dresses moved with her as she walked, revealing a thin strap, white cotton against her skin, a curve of the hip, a clavicle. I studied her smile, her gestures, the formality with which she spoke, until I could see her mouth and hands in the darkness and hear her voice over the traffic of my mind.

I didn't kiss Thea that first year. She left the circle of Deadheads and spent all of her time with me. She stayed over at night, sometimes for the whole weekend when her father was away, sleeping in my bed while I lay on the living room couch with her image flickering above me as I drifted off.

We talked about my father and her mother and growing up without them. I told her about Wichita, Dallas, Chicago, far-flung places I knew from my mother's stories and a few vague memories. She said one day she'd like to go to Vietnam and look for her relatives.

"When?" I asked.

"When I'm ready," she said.

And that was all. She knew next to nothing about her mother, had no photographs or memories of her mother's face, and would not have known where to start had she wanted to invent a life for her. Daniel Pierson would say only that Thea's mother lived in Saigon, that he knew her briefly, that his memory had been scattered by the war. She gave Thea up for adoption in 1972, the same year my father died.

"So both of us are orphans," Thea told me.

I had never thought of myself as an orphan before, but coming from Thea it sounded true. We were orphans. That was our bond.

When we graduated high school, she took a summer job as a candy striper at the university hospital while I worked as a copy boy for the
Columbia Pioneer.
Soon, with her father running a conference in D.C., she was spending nearly every night at our house, and life at 102 La Grange was too good to be true: Thea and I under the same roof, making hamburgers and homemade chicken fingers and the most delightfully unhealthy meals, going to Cajun Stella's for oysters on the half shell and blues at the amphitheater.

My mother, for the most part, made a great effort to stay out of our way. Early in the summer, though, she couldn't help but meddle. She cooked us casseroles, stayed up late, actually bought board games for the three of us to play. She said there were shades of her relationship with my father in my friendship with Thea, and went so far as to make copies of some old Western Union telegrams from one of my father's tours in the Navy. She left them on my desk so I could glimpse their own great love affair. For years I kept "
AT SEA WITHOUT YOU,
" wired by my father in 1960 from the Midway Islands, in a tiny compartment in my wallet.

As the summer wore on, my mother got the sense that we'd rather be alone and she disappeared, communicating mostly by notes and long, friendly messages on the answering machine. She worked all day and volunteered nights for the university's Gilbert and Sullivan Society, helping with costumes (her mother had been a seamstress in Greencastle, Indiana) for a summer-stock run of H.M.S.
Pinafore.

Meanwhile, Thea's touch was coloring the house. Each day I'd come back from work to find something new—a polished candlestick, a linen lampshade where a plastic one had been, plants in all the windows: African violets and daisies in the living room, begonias and English ivy in a box by the kitchen sink, an amaryllis on the sill in my mother's room. I found a hanging fuchsia in the bathroom one day and a tree with red peppers sitting on my desk.

With Thea around I became aware of the dreariness of our house: walls and moldings in need of paint, heavy gray curtains that blocked out the light, yellowing antimacassars on the living room couch, chairs that needed recaning. As clean as she kept it, my mother was content with the same old decor. Things I had once considered cheerful, like the orange rug she had installed when we moved in and the Bavarian cuckoo clock that no longer worked, now seemed grim.

One Saturday in August, a day after we had gone out with my mother for her birthday, Thea left the house to do an early round at the hospital. I had the day off and spent the morning in the garage making room for back copies of the
Washington Post,
a new addition to my newspaper collection. At lunchtime I walked to the deli and thought I might order a roast beef on rye with cole slaw and Russian dressing but, remembering the sanctity of that sandwich, to be shared with Thea only, decided on a turkey and onion instead. Rather than cutting through the Katy Trail, I took the long route home, along Maple to Eighth, then down to Stadium and La Grange.

At the corner of Eighth and Maple was a small nursery called College Gardens dealing mostly in house plants. I bought my mother a ficus there once, which died the summer we went to Florida when our boarders neglected to water it.

It must have been the red and white of her candy striper uniform that caught my eye. Leaning on her elbows with her chin in her hands, moving her head from side to side coquettishly, at the window of a little shack by the greenhouse, was Thea. She was turned in the direction of a ponytailed garden clerk, who moved busily about in his hut. I crossed the street and ducked behind a car.

He was tall and blond with a scruffy beard and a tie-dyed shirt under his green garden smock. I couldn't hear what he was saying but it must have been amusing because Thea was laughing, clapping her hands together. When a customer stepped up to the shack hauling a rubber tree, Thea straightened and began to turn.

I walked hastily down Eighth, my mind a blank. At home I went directly to bed.

My mother came into the room sometime after six.

"Thea called about a half hour ago," she said. "She won't be back for dinner."

All night I waited for Thea to come home. When my mother turned in, I sat on the living room couch with the lights off waiting for the sound of a key in the door. A few times that summer Thea had slept at her own house to watch over things for her father. Now I knew why.

I went to the bedroom and buried my nose in the pillow where she had slept all summer. It smelled like Florida.

The night before at my mother's birthday dinner, Thea had said that with us she had finally found a sense of belonging. Now I imagined the garden clerk with his ponytail and tie-dyed shirt, leaning down and kissing Thea full on the lips, taking her hand, whisking her away.

At four in the morning, still awake, I went outside and sat on the front steps, where I fell asleep in the humid August air until the thump of the Sunday paper woke me and sent me back to my bedroom.

Not until noon, just as I was getting up, did Thea finally call, inviting my mother and me to lunch downtown.

"I'm sorry we missed each other last night," she began to say.

"Mother's busy," I said. "I'll meet you at Booche's in an hour."

Booche's was an old pool hall with warped cue sticks and excellent hamburgers just off the main drag on Ninth Street.

"Should we get a table?" she asked, hugging me as I walked in.

The pool hall was frigid, and I was sweating from the walk over. They always kept the a.c. too high in the summertime.

"Where were you last night?"

We took our places at the window seat. She looked at me steadily.

"I was out with a friend."

"What kind of a friend?" The nerves tightened my throat.

"Someone I knew from before," she said. "He used to live here but he moved away when his parents got divorced." She looked into her lap, where her hands were folded. "I saw him at Schnucks about a month ago and he told me he was working at the nursery."

"So that's where you've been getting the plants, isn't it?" I shifted in my seat.

She nodded yes, matter-of-factly. "Stuart gave them to me as gifts," she said, as if there were nothing wrong. "Every time I stopped by, he wouldn't let me leave unless I took something. I told him about you and Lorraine and the house and everything. He said it was his pleasure."

"His pleasure?" I raised my voice. "Stealing from his workplace!"

"It's his father's nursery," she said, as if that explained everything. "All those plants are his to give away."

I felt myself slouching.

"You'd like him a lot," she said.

"Oh, sure. I imagine I'd really like him."

"No, I mean it, Gordie. The three of us should go out sometime."

As the burgers arrived I excused myself, saying there was something I needed to do. I walked out of Booche's and over to Fifth, crossed Stadium, then four more blocks to my house. My mother was gone but the car was still there, so I loaded up the Gremlin with Thea's plants and drove them over to the nursery. I took them out one by one—begonias, violets, daisies and ivy, the amaryllis, the pepper tree, the hanging fuchsia, the orange tree, and the camellia—and left them at the little hut by the greenhouse.

"Do you have an employee here named Stuart?" I asked another ponytailed garden clerk who had come over to assist me. "Tell him I have no use for these plants."

For the rest of the summer I ignored Thea's calls. My mother's plea for me to be reasonable had no effect, and as college began, all of my energies focused on proving myself. I would be a student and after that a journalist. Nothing else mattered.

Clearly I had not been ready for the complexities of love, but one day I knew I would find the pure perfect woman, and I'd show Thea Pierson what a mistake she had made.

"Thea would like to call you," my mother said, bringing me back to the present.

"Why's that?" I was pacing. "I haven't spoken with her in four years."

"I don't know, Gordie. She still talks about you. She says she'll never understand what happened. One day you were the best of friends. The next you were leaving the house any time she stopped by."

I had never given my mother a proper explanation. I'd simply said we'd had a sudden falling out. "It's probably for the best anyway. I need to concentrate on more important things."

But my mother had kept in touch with her, mostly by mail, when Thea went off to Brown University and then to summer in-ternships at NIH in D.C. and the Houston Medical Center. She'd leave Thea's letters open on the dinette table hoping that I'd read them. And I did, of course, but there was never any mention of boyfriends and only good-natured questions about me.

Every once in a while I'd see Thea's father, around campus or eating alone at a restaurant bar, his face buried in the
Nation
or the
New York Review of Books,
and inevitably I'd think about her.

"She doesn't know anyone in St. Louis," my mother said. "I think it would be decent of you to make her feel welcome."

"I don't know anyone in St. Louis either." I thought of Alicia Whiting, also alone, but in her well-appointed house, her show dog curled at her feet.

"That's not the point, Gordie. She's a stranger in the city, and a woman. Certain things you have to do for the sake of decency."

"I'm extremely busy," I said. "It's not like I work a nine-to-five
job.
"

"Well, I've given her your number," my mother said, and with that she hung up.

I CAME IN TO WORK
early Sunday morning feeling out of balance. I needed to clear my head, so I sat at my desk and read the
New York Times
and the
Independent
from cover to cover, concentrating on every detail, as if trying to commit the stories to memory.

Nineteen eighty-nine had become the year of foreign news. The civil war in Nicaragua was over, the Soviets were out of Afghanistan, Solidarity had been legalized in Poland, paving the way for democratic reform. Hungary had moved to socialism without a show of force from the Soviet government. And for six weeks in May and early June, China had seemed headed for reform as well.

Part of me wished all the upheaval could be delayed. Why was the world changing so rapidly at
this
moment, while I still labored in the clattering outpost of Obits? I didn't doubt that I would still be touched by history, but 1989, as it was shaping up, felt like an opportunity passing me by. I wanted to be in Eastern Europe—I daydreamed of reporting from the next great flashpoint—but I doubted that even my father would have picked up the Sunday paper and said
That's where the story is
and hopped the next plane to Prague.

I was an obituary writer. My job was taking the measure of people's lives. I wanted to move on from this assignment but had to believe that it was not unimportant, even if obituary writing, when I came to think of it, was something of journalism's opposite: instead of going out to find the story, the story comes to you.

I decided my next three advancers would be the dictators still in power in Eastern Europe: Zhivkov in Bulgaria, Ceausescu in Romania, Honecker in East Germany. One was certain to die in a coup. They were old anyway. The unrest would be too much for their black hearts to take.

I was working on Erich Honecker's obit when Dick Ritger walked in.