Thomas McConnell
Maybe she was always this way and I just suppressed it, but I never saw anybody fancy a funeral as much as Mama. Her morning headlines were the obituaries. She used to call me up and say “Oh Mamie. I just went to the saddest memorial service, let me tell you about it,” and it would be some thirty-seven-year-old boy was the son of somebody from church dropped dead of heart failure at his mailbox. She didn’t say if the cause was a big bill or not. She can’t carry a tune with both hands and a bucket so if it’s not the organ or hymns then the preaching bores her rolling eyes to tears and most of the people give her a pain in the pew. But I’d go over there and she’d have a long trail of abbreviations on her scratch pad for us to work through, Doc, Groc, Pharm, Ol Flks, and I’d check my fingernail down the list and say “Mother, why are we going to the Fun House?” and she’d huff out her mouth like I knew she would and say “That’s the funeral home, Mamie,” her nose wrinkling up like it smelled the disapproval of her upper lip.
Before the end of the agenda and the last of the day we’d find ourselves in one frigid sanctuary or another and she’d say “Which flowers are ours you reckon?” and white-haired people would flash their bifocals and I’d whisper “Not so loud, Mother,” and she’d say “There’s that Ruth Trotter. How old do you suppose that biddy is now?” and I’d hiss I had no idea and Mama saying “Well whatever it is she looks every day of it” to more scowls and gawping.
I know she talks loud on account of Daddy. Re-repeating every word you say must dilate your throat somehow or overgrow your tongue muscle too strong. One dinnertime we’d just sat down to their table and Mama said “Henry. Do you want some salt? Mamie cooked again,” and he said “Pardon?” and she said “Do you want salt?” and he said “Granny?” and she screamed “Salt, Henry, for God’s sake do you want some salt, Lord!” and he looked over his glasses at me and I handed him the shaker. When we were about done Mama hiked up on one hip and mumbled “Excuse me” and Daddy arched an eyebrow and said “Now if I’d done that at this table you’d be hollering” and Mama said “Goddamnit to Hell, Henry, you can’t hear shit but you sure can hear a fart.”
He bent an ear and said, “How’s that?”
But the point is here we go shuffling our gooseflesh down the aisle again and eventually the day’s third preacher is spreading his arms so the black sleeves look like giant bat wings behind the oaken casket and Mama had already speculated twice about the flowers and thrice about the half-black grandboy on the front row before the preacher asked the congregation, “If you acknowledge in the Lord, say Amen,” and everybody said Amen, and he said “If you believe in the resurrection, say Amen,” and everybody believed and he said “If you’re affirmed Ophelia Whorf is mounted up to heaven itself and you want to go to heaven and be with Ophelia Whorf, say Amen,” and Mama said “I hope Ophelia is in heaven and I hope I get there too but I don’t particularly want to hang out with her,” and by this time even the preacher is glowering down at us.
“Mother,” I said, crunching over the gravel in the parking lot. “You have literally embarrassed me to death.”
“Literally, Mamie?” she said. “Literally?”
So on we head to our next destination, past tattoo parlors and pawnshops and some guy dressed up like the Statue of Liberty waving the torch and the tablet at us from the weeds in the sidewalk when something prompted Mama to say “You know what your father asked me other day? If I’d ever been in a earthquake” and I said “What did you tell him?”
“I told him, said, If I’d been in a earthquake don’t you think I might would have mentioned it in the last fifty-six years?”
I nodded and turned the wheel and Mama said “I liked it better when they lived down in the country” and I said “I bet they do too” and Mama said “I don’t think they know where they are now” and I said “That’s one blessed thing for the best.” We both knew that when we walked in some pimply girl with a bedpan in her hands would coo to them peering side by side from their twin beds “Well look who’s here now” and Ethel and Arminda would puzzle us up and down in the doorway for a while before Ethel would say “Who? Who?”
The wheel turned again and that brought us to a standstill before the redbrick and pulled curtains. The wind was shivering every branch of the line of dogwoods along the path in and I could tell what Mama was thinking: at least Daddy ain’t as bad as Ethel and Arminda but it’s coming.
She just sat there frowning at the breeze so I said, “Remember when we’d drive down to visit them at the homeplace. They’d be shucking ears on the porch and you and me and Jackie would climb into that old metal glider while their rocking chairs would screech across the boards to the edge and every hour they’d have to scooch them back and we’d chatter on and some days Arminda would believe she was the size of a pea and step very carefully in the center of each board because she was afraid she’d fall through the cracks and the chickens would peck her up.”
“She always was the thin side of crazy,” Mama said. “It’s a terrible thing when your mind goes even if you didn’t have much mind to begin with.”
“And she’d finally work herself inside and once the screen door clapped to Ethel would say, ‘I have no idea what she thinks about when she commences to sit on the pot.’”
I laughed. Mama shook her head.
“And one afternoon Ethel announced she had her tombstone inscription all ready. Ethel Azalea Maddox. Returned Unopened.”
“Poor Ethel,” Mama said. “She spent her whole life down that dirt road and now she’s here in the loony bin.” She took a big breath and let most of it go and said, “Let’s hurry and get this over with so we don’t have to smell that hash they’re always slinging in that cafeteria line.”
Otherwise it smelled like it always did, two shades of ammonia long before the door was pulled, pee under bleach. Down their corridor Ethel and Arminda gazed up at us from their beds, or Ethel anyway, the long bones of one hand folded over the long bones of the other. Arminda’s eyes kind of wandered the lights of the ceiling and didn’t land anywhere. We dropped into the two chairs and after Mama said “You don’t know who we are do you?” Ethel said “Depends on who you are,” and Mama said “I’m your niece. Your sister Bertha’s girl. Duveen.”
Ethel blinked once and said “You don’t look much like a girl to me.” Mama said “I don’t much feel like one either.”
“I need to ask somebody about something,” Ethel said, and shot out her upper dentures so their porcelain curve bit her lower lip. Then she retracted them. “Who’s that woman in that bed yonder?”
“Arminda? That’s your sister Arminda.”
“How do you know?” Ethel said.
“Well. That’s what I’ve been told for all my life.”
“But how do you know they weren’t liars, those people who told you that?”
“They never lied to me about anything else. My mama and your mama and daddy. So I just assumed when they said you two were sisters they knew what they were talking about. They were there, or thereabouts.”
Ethel asked, “What color hair did you have when you were small?”
“It was blond as straw and thin,” Mama said, “and then it thickened and darkened up like all the other girls in the family.”
“And they said it was beautiful hair and petted it and told you you were a pretty little thing,” Ethel said.
“Sometimes,” Mama said.
“Well,” Ethel said, “that proves right there they were all a damn pack of liars. And I wish to God they’d get this woman away from me. She’s crazier than a betsy bug.”
“What does she do?” Mama said.
“She moans through the night and lies there crapping her plastic pants. Isn’t that enough?” Ethel said.
Mama had to nod. Ethel glared a while at me.
“Where’s the other one?”
“The other one of what?” I said.
“The other one of you,” Ethel said. “The one beside you.”
Mama and I swapped looks.
“Do you mean Jackie?” I said. “My sister Jackie?”
“Screw you, bitch,” Ethel said. “I don’t know what I mean. If I did would I be asking? But there used to be a second of you.”
“Sometimes Jackie comes with us,” Mama said.
“Once a year Christmastime,” I murmured.
“She’s watching Henry now,” Mama said. “You remember my husband Henry?”
“She was a heavy set thing,” Ethel said, “and too tall for her generation. No clothes could make her look any smaller than she was and she couldn’t get any menfolk to love her. Had great big hands, the span of a field hand’s.” Ethel looked into her shriveled palms. “I felt sorry for her. Her face was broad and pale as a pan of biscuit dough.”
“Jackie’s always been spare as a chickadee,” I said.
“She means Arminda,” Mama said. And then louder, “You’re talking about Arminda. Your sister.” Mama pointed. “Yonder, other side of the lamp table.”
Ethel twisted to inspect Arminda, whose eyes still swam over the ceiling as if it were a skyful of stars, her swollen fingers clutching up the satin border of the blanket like she was trying to hide all the moles on her neck.
Then Ethel said, “Oh shit.”
On the road driving away Mama was looking through her reflection at the payday lender’s and the fried chicken place and Bob’s Used Car. I said, “We’ve had a long day. How about I take you to Pick-a-dilly?”
“Sometimes,” Mama said to the front door of Shiloh Truth Tabernacle, “I just get in the car and go.”
“Your car?”
“No, Mamie. I steal Miz Parker’s car next door and don’t even replace the gas.”
“Where do you go?”
“Anywhere. Sometimes I go till I get lost but I just keep going till I see something I know and find my way back.”
“Who’s watching over Daddy?”
“Who’s watching over me?” Mama said. “Your daddy doesn’t know I’m gone. I come back and he’s slid down asleep in the chair with the game show channel so loud every dog in the neighborhood is all yawped out. He doesn’t know anybody’s in this world, him included.”
I glance over but she’s eying the strip mall unscrolling beyond the window.
“What do you want to do?” I said.
“Go to Pick-a-dilly, I guess.”
“I mean about Daddy.”
“Let him sleep,” Mama said. “Just let him sleep.”
The three crosses hammered into the lawn of the AME Church went by and some naked oaks standing over flaming forsythia though there was no sun out and then the acupuncturist shop beside the Fit and Sew and the stale bread store.
Mama said, “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
I began to opine that was a strange question from a churchgoer. Instead I said, “Not really. But after that earthquake I was in I began to have second thoughts.”
“Smart ass,” Mama said.
“You know I’m just joshing you, Mother. Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“I’d be afraid what I might come back as. A bug on the windshield. That polecat smushed up on the side the road. Damn he’s sour.”
“But then you’d get to start over.”
“I’m not sure I see any advantage in that. I’m not too happy with what I got this time.”
“What’s that?”
“An old woman. An ugly old woman.”
She watched the weeds a while before she said through thin lips, “Sometimes I drive out to these new developments where it used to be just fields and pasture, big places now with wide drives and stone faced round the front. Some of the doors are painted bright red with a brass kick plate and I think, Who lives in these places. What kind of work they do. Row after row, two stories, three. Mansions, some of them.”
“A lot of the ground floor is just garage,” I said, “if you look close.”
“And what kind of cars they got in those garages, Mamie? It ain’t no little Chevy like we’re puttering along in.”
“We do the best we can, Mother. We do all we can.”
She shook her glasses at something passing on.
“I don’t know. About sundown every evening I wonder what have I got to show for all my time.”
“You’ve got a paid for house and a car free and clear to go riding in and a marriage nearly six decades long and two daughters that love you. Got your own teeth and leisure in your hands. Seems to me that’s more than about five billion other people can say. Probably more than five billion. And that’s not even counting those that came before.”
“I know,” Mama said. “I know if you lived a thwarted life you did it to yourself.”
“You went forth, Mother. You multiplied.”
“Multiplied?” She tossed up her empty palms. “Those two old women back there, that’s what their mother did. And her mother back of that and then another mother whose name nobody can even remember now. I bet her tombstone’s broke and fallen on its face. And look where it got them. Sometimes it seems to me that all a mother does is multiply misery.”
“But that’s the end, Mother. You can’t think only about the end.”
“What? The end doesn’t matter?”
“No. I know it does. I guess that’s why we hope it will be quick. Life will be long but the end will be quick. But just because the end comes last that doesn’t mean we need to dwell on it.”
“That’s easy to say if you aren’t yet standing there among the rubble marking the end of the street. If you haven’t already spent up all your years.”
She swelled out a long sigh at everything past the window.
“I think about Ethel,” she said. “She talks dirty now because her brain’s evaporating inside her skull. I don’t know what the doctors call it and I don’t much care because you can see behind the blue murk in her eyes that’s what’s happening to her. But she was smart. She could’ve been a lawyer, or a judge. But a woman couldn’t do that in those days. Not girls down dirt roads with gritty chickens laying in the dust under the pilings of the house. That girl she was talking about, the heavy set one that no boys would love. That wasn’t Arminda. That was her. That was Ethel that Ethel felt sorry for.”
We didn’t eat much at Pick-a-dilly. Mama plowed the ruts of four tines through some mashed potatoes and I just stabbed at the meat between a sandwich that couldn’t be chewed. There we sat in the booth, the hum of the buffet around us, clinking glass and tinkling silverware plates and gums clacking. I could almost see the pulse beat over the bones through the sluggish veins across the backs of her hands.
Mostly we just stared at the broken food before us. Once I said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
“I said all Lazarus managed to do was just die again another day.”
Like always she got out her coin purse and declared she’d leave the tip, fingered out six pennies and two nickels and a dime and then took back one of the nickels and a penny. While she wrestled on her coat I scraped off all the change and left the two dollars I had ready. And then it was time for the slow road home because nobody was in a hurry.
Of course we could have driven backwards and that wouldn’t have kept anything from happening. The long black sheen of the body of it was still waiting there for us all the same in the driveway. Jackie must have heard us pull up on the grass. She came to stand on the porch pinching the wings of her nose red but she didn’t say anything, just went in ahead of us without holding the screen door. Two men in black suits had him on the gurney, a gray blanket covering him that had WARD’S FUNERAL HOME stitched on in a shade almost purple.
Jackie said, “I tried to call your cell but all it kept doing was rolling over.”
“I forgot,” I said. “We were in church.”
“I must have left you twenty messages.”
Jackie blew her nose again and her right foot kind of stomped the floor.
“When did it happen?” Mama said.
Jackie looked at her watch.
“About two. First I called the ambulance but—.” She blew her nose so the tissue came apart. “I was asking these men to stay till you got here.”
Mama nodded.
One of the men said, “Mrs. Underwood, would you like to see him before we go?” and Mama shook her head no. They had a hard time with the gurney through our old door and I was afraid he would fall off they had to twist it so but I guess they had the straps on under the blanket. They were sweating so much over their stiff collars they’d turned them blue by the time they slid him in and slammed the hatch on the hearse.
I sat down and held my jaw in both hands while Jackie wiped her nose.
“I only just left the room for a minute because I couldn’t stand the racket of one more contestant trying to solve the puzzle. If he made any noise I couldn’t have heard it over the spinning of that damn wheel. Time I came back his eyes were so stark and wide they were nearly unblurred.”
Mama got up again and shrugged off her coat and hung it in the closet and shuffled back to her recliner and pulled the tissue from her cuff and polished around her glasses. Even at the funeral three days later she whispered she just didn’t know why she couldn’t cry, but she never did.
Thomas McConnell’s work has appeared in the Connecticut Review, the Cortland Review, Shenandoah, Birmingham Arts Journal, Calabash, Yemassee, the Emrys Journal, the Charleston Post & Courier, Crossroads: A Southern Annual, Writing Macao, and Ars Medica among other publications. His awards and prizes include an artist’s grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the South Carolina Academy of Authors Fiction Fellowship, the Hackney National Literary Award for the Short Story, Porter Fleming Awards for Fiction, Essay, and Drama, the South Carolina Fiction Project, the H.E. Francis Award, and the Hardagree Award for Fiction. His lectures and readings have taken him to Istanbul, Berlin, and the Sorbonne in Paris. His collection of stories, A Picture Book of Hell and Other Landscapes, was published by Texas Tech University Press and nominated for the PEN/Bingham Award and the John Gardner Award for Short Fiction.