The Art of Mending (8 page)

“Where have you
been
?” Anthony asked.

“Why? Did you miss me?” I rose up to kiss the top of his head multiple times, just to annoy him. His head smelled good, a yeasty smell. “Awww, did you miss me?”

He frowned, looked away.

“Laura,” Pete said.

I turned toward him. “Yeah?” Then, my smile disappearing, I said, “What?” And then, as he got out of his chair and started toward me, his face full of sadness, “Oh, my God.”

12

WHEN PETE AND I HAD FINALLY GOTTEN AROUND TO
making our wills, we’d talked about what we wanted done at our funerals. He’d wanted a straight service, something dignified; I wanted something looser. I’d wanted things read by friends and relatives that would entertain and inspire: essays by Annie Dillard, poetry by Mary Oliver. I’d wanted one quilt over me, another one draped over the coffin, and the one called “Water at Night,” my pride and joy, the silver and black quilt that won first prize in a national competition—I’d wanted that quilt to be given away by a raffle drawing. When everyone filed out of the church, I’d wanted James Brown to be singing “I Feel Good.”

“You don’t want James
Brown,
” Pete had said, and I’d said, “Yes I do. I want people to think that’s how it is, over yonder. That you feel good.”

“Okay,” he’d said, in that singsong way that meant
I think you’re nuts.

Of course when you plan your funeral, you do it thinking you won’t really die. It’s just a good exercise. You plan it in case you die.

You know your parents are going to die, but they are going to die later. They are going to die
sometime.
But that time will not come until you no longer need them. While you still need them, or might need them, they will have the good taste and common courtesy not to leave. This was how I’d always thought of it, I see now.

At my father’s funeral I sat frozen, holding Pete’s hand tightly and feeling absolutely nothing. The priest was standing at the pulpit, sharing amusing anecdotes about my father so we could all remember we were here
not to mourn a death but to celebrate a life.
Amid the sounds of sniffing and discreet nose-blowing came appreciative chuckles—appreciative or obligatory, I wasn’t sure which.

Steve sat in the row ahead of us, Tessa leaning into him. On his other side sat my mother, dabbing at her eyes. At the end of our row, Caroline sat next to Bill but at a slight declarative distance from him. I looked around the church, at the dull sheen of old gold, the stained-glass windows. I thought about a quilt I’d once made out of jewel-colored douppioni silks, designed to look like stained glass. I remembered a time I’d sat beside my father when we went to midnight mass. The decorations were so beautiful, the music so rich, I’d begun to quietly weep in awe and appreciation, and my father, staring straight ahead, had reached over to take my hand:
I know.
And now the dam broke and I understood that it was true; my father had died and I was sitting here at his funeral and he would never take my hand again.

I remembered him reading to me when I had the mumps, the same battered Little Golden Book, over and over again. I remembered him bandaging my knee on a day I fell off my bike, hugging me before I left for college, walking me down the aisle on my wedding day, how his eyes filled with tears when he told Pete in as stern a voice as he could muster, “You take good care of her, now.” I thought of riding high on his shoulders when I was three, him trying to teach me how to whistle, and how, when I learned, he’d given me a new dollar bill. I remembered the night someone stole my Halloween candy and I came home crying, and he went out for hours looking for some boy dressed as a skeleton. I remembered the first quilt show I had at a gallery, how he had come to the opening and walked up to everyone there, saying quietly, “Hi, how are you, I’m her father; she’s my daughter; isn’t she something?”

My chest heaved and a whimpering sound escaped that under other circumstances might have embarrassed me. But now, I didn’t care about anything except the fact that my father had died and I had not been ready. I had not been done with him. I wanted him to come back for just half an hour, so I could say what I had saved up for another time. For later.

I thought, There was a
tag
tied to his toe.

I thought, His clothes were not folded and put on the shelf inside the metal locker, they were tossed onto the bottom of it, and his blue shirt was turned inside out.

I thought, His glasses were on the otherwise empty nightstand, and his wallet was in the otherwise empty drawer, only I thought of it this way: His little glasses. His little wallet.

I thought, He didn’t know, he had no idea, he was only trying to eat his tasteless hospital dinner thinking that tomorrow night he’d be home to watch television with my mother in the family room, his simple evening pleasure. And then his cup had fallen, and coffee had run from the side of his mouth, and despite everything they tried he was gone.

I squeezed Pete’s hand tighter. I thought,
Don’t ever leave me, let me go first.
From the corner of my eye I saw the knees of my children. They were so old now, not really children anymore.
Stop that,
I wanted to tell them.
Hold still.

13

AT MY PARENTS’—NOW MY MOTHER’S—HOUSE, THE
living room was crowded with people who had come over after the funeral. I’d met so many strangers who knew my father, had talked to so many friends and relatives I’d known since I was a child, that I’d actually gotten hoarse. I went into the TV room, needing a break, and found Anthony sitting in my father’s leather recliner, his knee bouncing wildly.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” He didn’t look at me. His knee slowed, stopped.

I sat in my mother’s blue velvet club chair. “How are you doing, sweetheart?”

He shrugged.

“It’s hard, huh?” I said. “Hard to realize that one minute he was just—”

“It’s not that!”

“Oh.” I sat still, waiting.

He looked at me, then quickly wiped a tear away. “It’s not that he died. People
die.
It’s
.
.
.
this.
I mean, I think it’s really gross, what’s going on out there. People just . . . chewing their dumb sandwiches and drinking and laughing. It’s not a party! How come nobody’s talking about Grandpa?”

“Well, some people are. Here and there. Some people are. But I think I know how you feel. When Great-grandma died, there was a lunch in the church basement after her funeral, and I remember looking around, thinking, This could be anything
but
a funeral.”

“Exactly.” He looked over at me. “A celebration for someone graduating high school or something. A birthday.”

“Yes. But I see it differently. I think what this is, is people just needing to do something, to keep going and not be alone. You know? What if these people didn’t come back here? Then Grandma would be by herself. And she—”

“She wouldn’t be alone! We’re here!”

“Well, yes. We’re here now. But we aren’t going to be staying here. These people all live nearby.”

The knee again. And then Anthony reached for the remote. “There’s a good baseball game on. Why don’t I just watch it?” He looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Okay?”

I didn’t know if he was serious or not. “I suppose you could.”

“I don’t want to watch a game!”

“You could, though, and there would be nothing wrong with it. People . . . they have to find their own ways. Everybody has a different method of coping with grief, and no one way is better than another. You might
need
to watch a baseball game now. It might remind you of your normal life, of what you have to go back to. For Grandma . . . well, she needs to be reminded that people are around to help her. All these people ‘eating their dumb sandwiches’ will tell her that if she needs anything—”

“Yeah, and most of them won’t even mean it!”

“Some of them might not. But others will.” I leaned back and felt an edgy restlessness snaking through me. I needed to go outside. Later, I’d ask Pete to take a walk with me. I hadn’t had a chance to be alone with him since we’d arrived, and that’s what
I
needed. “It’s like falling off a cliff, Anthony, when someone dies this suddenly. And these rituals we have, whatever they are—watching sports or having dinner parties, or . . . oh, I don’t know, wearing a yellow tie every third Thursday—they provide some sort of support. You know what I mean? So you can watch baseball. Hannah can call her friends—Hannah
is
on the phone with Gracie, right now. And Grandma is in the kitchen peeling Saran Wrap off cold cuts and tossing salads and arranging cookies on platters instead of weeping in her darkened bedroom with the door closed. All of this—I don’t know, maybe it forges a new neural pathway, almost. It helps you go on in this new situation. It teaches you how. Don’t you think Grandma’s heart is breaking? Of course it is. But does she honor Grandpa by collapsing into grief? Believe me, she’ll do plenty of that. But for right now, I think it’s better if she talks to people and accepts the gifts they can offer. No one is saying Grandpa’s life didn’t matter. They’re just coming together to do what they can. They’re providing some structure, some order, to a situation that feels out of control, especially to Grandma.”

Anthony listened, biting at his lower lip. Then he stood up. “So what should I do? I’m sorry, I just don’t feel like talking to strangers, answering all these dumb questions about how do I like North Dakota, I ought to play basketball, I’m so tall, blah, blah, blah. But I’d like to . . . should I maybe throw away the used paper plates?” He laughed in his harsh teenage way, embarrassed.

“I think that’s a perfect thing to do.”

He came over to me, put his hand on my shoulder. “And . . . are you okay, Mom? You know, I just realized . . . It was your dad!”

I smiled up at him. “I’m fine. You know what I’m mostly thinking? That I’m so lucky. To have had him, and to have you.”

There, a hint of color in his face, his shoulders shifting off some discomfort. I wasn’t allowed to show him much affection anymore, no matter how oblique it might be. When he was in second grade, I was allowed to kiss him before he left for school only in the coat closet, door closed. By the time he got to third grade, I got in trouble for even thinking about kissing him. Yet there are still nights when I sit at the side of his bed before he goes to sleep and we talk for a long time—about nothing, really. He lies stretched out under the covers with his hands linked behind his head, smelling of shampoo, his bedside lamp giving him a halo. “O’Conner thinks he’s set for a basketball scholarship,” he’ll say. “Huh!” I’ll say. “A scholarship! That’s great.” And I’ll be thinking,
You’ve become a man, right in front of my eyes. I can’t bear the thought that you’ll leave soon.

“You want me to bring you anything?” Anthony asked. “Want a sandwich or something? Cookies?”

“No, thanks. I’m fine.”

Just after he left the room, Caroline came in. She sat in my father’s chair, looked over at me, and sighed. “Well. That’s that.”

“Yeah,” I said sadly.

“I mean, now nobody will ever believe me.”

“Oh, my God. You—” I stared at her.

“
What,
Laura?”

I shook my head, got up from my chair, and walked out.

In the living room, I caught sight of Hannah sitting alone on the sofa, and I went to sit beside her, took her hand.

“How’s Gracie?”

“Fine. She said she misses me.”

“Ah. That’s nice. It’s nice to be missed, huh?”

“I miss Grandpa already. And I feel so sorry. Like for how I didn’t do stuff for him.”

“He adored you. Do you know that?”

A moment. Then she nodded.

“You did a lot for him by just being you.”

“No, I didn’t. I should have done way more things. Like every time we were leaving, he used to say, ‘Drop me a line, kiddo!’ And I hardly ever wrote him. Only about four or five times in my whole life!”

“I guess none of us ever does all that we might have for one another. But I know this: You were a wonderful granddaughter, and you brought great joy to his life. When you were born and he came to see you, I had to practically pry you off him. He sat with you in that big ugly rocking recliner we used to have and talked to you and told you jokes and insisted that you understood every word he said. ‘She likes me best,’ he kept saying. I think it made Dad a little jealous.”

Hannah smiled, looked up at me.

“And when he said, ‘Drop me a line,’ what he meant was, Keep in touch. Which you certainly did.”

“One time when I was six I called him when you weren’t even home.”

“Did you? What did you talk about?”

“Hamsters. I wanted one, and you wouldn’t get me one. He told me”—she covered her mouth, started to giggle—“I still remember, exactly. He said, ‘Oh, no, you don’t want one of them; they eat their young. You don’t want to be watching mama hamster spreading mustard on her baby, do you?’ It was
weird
!
Do
they eat their young?”

“I have heard they do, sometimes. See how wise I was not to let you have one?”

Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know. But anyway. I guess it’s good he died right away, right?”

“Yes, for his sake.”

“I wonder if he knew he was dying.”

“I don’t know, honey.” I looked around the crowded room: men talking to men, women talking to women, mostly. “Don’t know.”

“What will Grandma do now?”

I looked over at my mother, standing next to Elaine Pinkers, the young woman who lives next door. My mother was talking animatedly. She could have been the perfect hostess except that she looked . . . puzzled.

“I don’t know what Grandma will do. We’ll have to see.” Condo, I was thinking. Don’t all widows move to condos and make container gardens on their balconies? Go out to lunch with friends and bring home leftovers that they eat for dinner? I’d have to come back and help her move at some point. And I’d tell Steve he had to help—no bowing out of this one.

“Aunt Caroline was crying in the bathroom,” Hannah said.

“Was she?”

“Uh-huh. I came in by accident, and she was sitting on the edge of the bathtub crying real hard.”

“Well, I suppose we’ll all be doing some of that. But it’s okay to cry, right?”

“Right. Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t take this wrong, okay? But when will we be going home?”

“Don’t take
this
wrong. But as soon as we possibly can.”

AFTER EVERYONE LEFT AND MY MOTHER WENT TO BED,
Pete and I took our walk. At a school playground a few blocks away, we sat on a bench holding hands, saying nothing. When I started to cry, he pulled me closer, kissed the top of my head. “I’m so sorry.”

I nodded, gulped back sobs.

“You want to stay for a while? I can take the kids home, and you could stay and help her figure out what she’s going to do.”

“I want to go home, though.”

“Well, that’s what we’ll do, then.”

“But you’re right, I should stay. And not just to help Mom. I need to help Caroline. She’s—oh, Pete, she told me the most awful things.”

I repeated everything Caroline had said and waited for his reaction. It was not what I had expected. He simply nodded. “Sounds like you do need to be here for a while.”

“But . . . don’t you find this incredible?”

“Do you believe her?”

“I’m trying to, but I don’t know. I can’t imagine that these things went on in the house I lived in. That neither Steve nor I knew anything about it. I know my mother’s odd about some things. And she’s narcissistic—although any woman as beautiful as she was has that problem, it seems to me. But I can’t imagine her doing such things.”

“Okay.”

“What does that mean?”

He looked at me, said nothing.

“What do you mean, ‘Okay’?”

“I guess I mean the truth could be either or in between. And that I know this is bad, but it’s not as shocking to me as it is to you.” He turned toward me. “You know, I never told you this; I never wanted to. But maybe I should.”

I waited, then finally said, “What?”

“I just . . . I don’t want it to change the way you feel about my family.”

“
What,
Pete?”

He leaned back against the bench. “You know why I hate swearing so much?”

“No. Why do you?”

“Because when we were really young, my father used to . . . when my brother and I did something wrong, Subby used to take us out to the garage and yank our pants down and beat the hell out of us. And the whole time he did it, he’d be swearing; it was the only time I ever heard him swear. He did this for a few years, and then he stopped. He just stopped. I don’t know why. I don’t know if he came to his senses or got in trouble or got some help or what happened. He just stopped.”

“Wait. What about that story you told me once? When he pretended to hit you?”

“That’s true. That was after.”

“So when he hit you those other times, your mother knew?”

“She knew.”

“Well, this is just . . . I’m astonished! It doesn’t fit with them.”

“It doesn’t fit with what you know. Knew.”

I swallowed hard, said nothing. But then, “You know, Pete, my dad just died. Why did you tell me that? I don’t have room for anything else. Why did you tell me that?”

He put his arms around me, spoke softly into my ear. “Because something is not everything. You know? And because nobody knows what goes on in other families, because families lie about themselves to other people. Not only to other people but to one another. And to themselves.”

I pulled away from him. “We don’t! Our family doesn’t!”

“Well. Maybe to a lesser degree.”

“What do you mean! What do we lie about in our family?”

“All right. I want to say two things. Three things. One, we don’t any of us always say what we really feel, do we? Not Hannah, not Anthony, not you or me. And aren’t we lying to each other in that way?

“Two, we’re not finished with one another as a family, and I hope we never will be. But things will come up. We will disappoint each other, we might—things will come up, that’s all. People living with people makes for conflict. The truth is, we’re not such a peaceful species. But the good part about conflict is that if you get through it you’re stronger.

“Now. Three. Your dad did just die. And I want to help you. I want to make things easier for you. So let’s talk about how to do that. And Laura? Sweetheart? I love you.”

I took his hand, stared out at the jungle gym, the boxes-within-boxes pattern of it. Because of the angle. If you looked at it one way, you didn’t see them. If you looked another way, you did. “I love you too,” I said. The words seemed so small, a cardboard shield.

We sat without talking for a long time, and then I said, “I want to go home tomorrow and get some things. I want my work. Then I’ll come back here and sort this all out.”

MAGGIE ONCE TOLD ME ABOUT A FRIEND OF HERS
who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. “She only went to the doctor because she was having diarrhea,” Maggie said. “She thought it was from a trip she’d taken to Mexico. The doctor told her she had about six months to live, at the outside. She said at first it was like she was lying under a pile of bricks. For about a week, all she did was lie on the sofa and cry. But then she got up and got going again. About a month before she died, she told me that something really good had come of this diagnosis: It had forced a reconciliation between her and a daughter with whom she’d not spoken in years. She said if it hadn’t been for the cancer, she might have died without ever saying anything she needed so much to say, without ever saying anything true. I told her, ‘But you can’t be saying it was worth it, to have gotten this!’ And she said yes, that was what she was saying. I said, ‘Well, I have to tell you, I find that hard to believe. Surely there’s a way other than catastrophe to learn to speak the truth.’ And she said, ‘Maybe there is. But I would never have found it. In the end, what does it matter how you find the thing you need most? Or even when? Just so long as you find it, and you can die in peace.’ ” Maggie looked over at me, her eyes full of tears. “But it does matter when,” she said, and I said I knew. And then Maggie suddenly reached over to hug me so fiercely it hurt. “We’re so lucky,” she said, and I nodded into her shoulder. “It’s kind of scary to be so lucky,” she said, and I nodded again. I knew exactly what she meant. Sometimes being lucky is only waiting for a fall.