She reaches up her dress and into her underwear, searching for a fantasy, a hook, running through the roster of what she’s known: her bat mitzvah — era crushes, her high school boyfriend, her college love, strings of meaningless hookups, Alex, the specter of teamgangbang vs. some unfortunate wench, cute Zac — waiting for the wanting to alight on something worthwhile, something concrete enough to comprise a fantasy, something identifiably hers. But almost immediately she can feel that it’s futile, that she has no orgasm in her, nothing to provoke the basis for an orgasm, nothing to hold on to and celebrate in that way, no memory good enough to help her get there, nothing to reach back for that would even get her close.
Spooked
I am useful in situations like these. Someone has died, and we are all gathered here, flies on shit, eating and talking, mindful to keep our voices low and somber. My mother is standing by a tray of cold cuts, shaking her head, her face full of sadness. My mother is good at this. Later she will tell me: “Brenda is not dealing properly. She needs to face reality sooner or later. I’ll bring over some soup next week.” But right now my mother is shaking her head and speaking softly to Brenda, the widow, her closest friend and once-upon-a-time sorority sister. Brenda seems like she’s wondering what’s happened, looking around her living room at all these familiar faces, until it rushes back and hits her squarely in the chest, a heavy, sticky awareness that spreads like syrup: Her husband, Howard, is dead.
My mother sort of knows this drill, sort of knows about the dead weight in Brenda’s chest, sort of knows about trays and trays of cold cuts and bagels and pastries, about disbelief. My father left us when I was six, before I could form a lasting impression of him. All I have are blurry images of his black wingtips coming home from work, the feeling of his facial stubble against my chubby cheeks when he kissed me, vestiges of his funky-rancid smell after a set of push-ups on their bedroom floor on Sundays. We are closed off, my mother and I, and we do not discuss my father, whose name was Neil. He didn’t die, but he’s still gone, and I like to pretend he is dead. It’s a lot simpler that way.
I wonder what I would have been like at six, in a similar roomful of sad and sympathetic people. Inappropriate, I bet, talking and laughing loudly, disturbing the reverie of people missing Neil. A six-year-old is a six-year-old, death in the family or no. Now that I’m older, I wish that I could really experience the loss of Neil. This time he would really be dead, and I would really feel it.
My mother comes over to me, ever helpful, exactly who you’d want at your dead husband’s shiva, to ask if I wouldn’t mind taking Tulip for a walk. Tulip is lying in the corner of the room, and she lifts a bored eyebrow at the sound of her name, but makes no movement. I don’t know what kind of dog she is, but she always seems depressed and a little bit sick, with crusty eye boogers and a kind of socky smell. “She hasn’t been walked since it happened,” my mother tells me. “Danny’s too upset to have to think about this now. It would be such a help, Jilly, please?” Like I said: I am useful in situations like these. Appropriate, on call.
I like pretending that Tulip is my dog, that this is my house we are leaving to go on our walk, that it is Neil who died the day before yesterday, that it is my time to be sad about Neil. I would really like to be the kind of person who has a dog, who walks the dog, who wears these sleek black funeral clothes with such grace and ease on a sunny afternoon walk around the block, whose dad is actually dead and not just gone.
So I invent: My name is Juanita and I have eight brothers and sisters and a concave stomach and a boyfriend in the eleventh grade, in a band. And then I revise: It is my father who is dead today, and I have cried with restrained fury and sorrow all morning, I am exhausted with the effort it took to make it through, and now I am on a walk with my faithful only friend, Tulip.
It strikes me suddenly that I am walking the dead man’s dog. How close I am to the dead man himself! My father was allergic to dogs, but what if we’d had one? Then there’d be something left, a direct link to Neil. Neil’s best friend. The leash yanks Tulip slightly backward as I come to a near stop, making it seem as if she were flinching at something or someone. A ghost, perhaps: Howard, dancing, twirling, floating up to some clear-arteried heaven.
This is a nice neighborhood. “Nouveau riche,” my mother hissed at me as we drove through here earlier today. Our neighborhood is older, not as repetitive and planned as this one. “The landscaping says it all,” she said, flat and harsh as the street itself. She said she couldn’t understand why Brenda and Howard would choose to move here, to this provincial suburban nightmare of wide sidewalks and wider-open spaces above and around each pink pastry of a house. Good schools for Danny or no.
But everything seems even and right as I walk with Tulip. I imagine that Tulip and I are in a play. The scenery behind us, painted on a long sheet of butcher paper like the kind they used to cover the tables during art in kindergarten, is rolling by slowly while we move our legs in place. It is a stage trick, an illusion. It is better than reality.
Truthfully I half-expected Danny to fall into my arms this morning. I really wouldn’t have minded if he’d buried his head in my breast and gotten snot on my dress in a fit of anguish. It stung, like a stubbed toe, when he looked past me, eyes focused on some distant, fascinating point, and only nodded slightly at my mother. I wished I didn’t know him in his dark gray suit, so that I could look at him and not see him at nine, picking his nose. I wished I could take him out of context. The sight of him (serious as a heart attack, trying to keep his balance while sidestepping headstones) pinned me to myself, made me claustrophobic, closed up in a plain pine box for good. It’s hard to take death seriously in the thick of it. Years of TV funerals take over and play themselves out: the downcast mouths, subdued gestures, understanding nods. I looked at the sky, I wondered if I still had any lipstick on, I pretended we were burying a time capsule.
My own father’s departure was too long ago to be of any benefit to me now, and it wasn’t even the right kind of departure. I get no sympathy when it matters; none of my high school teachers put their arms around me and tell me to finish my American History paper whenever I can, no rush. But I still want the clout I deserve. My father’s gone, too, I fiercely and silently tell Danny. Don’t think you’re the only one. But he ignored me this morning, standing off by himself a bit, body language telling everyone to fuck off.
“Danny needs to learn that he does not have a monopoly on tragedy,” said my mother on the way through the gates of the cemetery; the worst over, the Mexican men left to pile dirt onto the casket, each thwack! of earth on wood like a heartbeat in the sinuses when you have a headache.
Danny looked a lot like his dead father. I thought it might make sense for my mother to envy Brenda that, a dead ringer for her dead husband. Dead, dead, dead, dead, I have to keep reminding myself. I’m finding it necessary to rehash Howard in my head: a father, a husband, a wearer of arrow-collar polyester shirts, bemoaner of conservative politics. He grew his hair long in the back to reimburse his ego for the thinning on top. I remembered him commenting on my breasts a few times (Filling out nicely, aren’t we, Jill?). Dead of a heart attack at fifty-something. Survived by a wife and a look-alike adolescent son and indifferent, confused dog wondering at abandonment and the smell of the hand that fed her.