One night, Freezy explained ghosts. “Look Bananas, here we are all bodies, each with a personality. But what if our body got so sick it never moved again and our personality floated out?” Freezy made her hands like a butterfly flying around her. “If there weren’t such strict rules of science, I would visit the dead world.” Frankie rolled his eyes. It was past all bedtimes. Freezy danced around the kitchen. “Let there be ghosts!” she whispered into the knife-fork-and-spoon drawer. “Let there be ghosts!” to the totems through the window.
Milt told a ghost story about a plane crash during a war. The pilot was covered with flames and there was no water. Then the younger cousins told ones they’d heard. Most of the stories had the sad ghost trying to creep back into life, the paradise of the bodies. They just wanted to play a small part. They were lonely. They knew nothing bad could really happen to them because something already had.
The totems were almost complete. Frankie added a sports part with a carved football and hockey puck, including an actual baseball bat nailed on. I wrote a poem in Sharpie and dug out our initials at the base of the totems. My mother finished a carving of Grandma while my aunt sawed out a representation of god. Freezy told me that god was life and life was blood in bodies (human life at least) and that if we had bodies, well, then we could forget it, all the looking for god and calling out to him (or her or it). “He’s right here, Stupid!” she said, jabbing me in the chest.
Grandma hated the totems. The kids were trying tricks on their jump ropes, hurting each other with glee, when Grandma stepped out of the car service. “How I hate public art,” she declared grandly. We looked at the smiley faces gouged in, the stickers Bananas had spared from her collection. Grandma stuck a high heel in the recently cut grass. “Isn’t life lively enough?” Stray blades stuck on her patent leather. Her left heel impatiently brushed off her right. “Life was certainly lively enough!” She glanced at the totems, then at her outfit with approval—blue ultra-suede vest and pants, fox fur trim, and a huge turquoise pendant that cooled her heart. She looked each of us in the face. “There were so many textures,” she said to Freezy Jane. “The sky was always changing. If for one minute it was all one shade of blue-grey, then a pack of birds would fly right through it, or an airplane, always!” Our eyes settled on the grinning Mickey Mouse head Milt was proud of, the bright poster paint where Freezy could reach. How come it looked so good when the Indians did it? She paced unsteadily. Her heels were covered in cut grass. She stuck a finger in a totem groove. “That was my favorite part, how even the sky never looked solid.” Jump ropes fell around sneakers.
Grandma put her purse down. “The kids were beautiful in their selfishness. The little possessions they held in shelves, delicate things they were not afraid to break and they broke them. All dogs played in this grassy area in the middle.” She motioned to the long yard between the house and the road. “Life was wide and open. Trees were for climbing, spiders made crazy houses.” Grandma leaned towards me and whispered, “Sex will take you down. You will like it, but it will trick you. Your stomach will egg out, love and time braiding unconsciously together, the years collecting in a net. Wearily you will have to keep on, even when you are half-full of birthdays.”
Grandma wandered back over to one of the totems. She leaned against it for support. “What’s this?” Freezy showed her the part that was Freezy’s belongings hot-glued on. “Your machine!” Grandma gasped touching the mini-iPod. This was the machine that waited on Freezy’s napkin while dinner was in session, that teachers confiscated daily and gave back at the bell.
Freezy crawled up one of the ladders and declared, “Forget about money and things that take up place! I mean space. This stuff is nothing compared to a real person.” Her words like ribbon, her whole life in a fat nine years, “The totems are grand! We are having so much fun!” She looked at Grandma leaning against the totem and continued bravely, “In the end, the END, the end will pass as quick as the Super Bowl does. Really quick like the Super Bowl dies. Like the Super Bowl does, earlier each year. Trash overflowing places for trash. My bath overflowing and ruining my bath.” Freezy sat down on the ladder. We looked expectantly at Grandma.
“What are you all waiting for? An alien ship to touch down and take me away? The kids should be in school.” Bananas hid behind Milt. Grandma slung her purse strap over her shoulder. “I love all of you. Today is just a day. I’ll miss you. If you felt you had to hack up the trees, well, then I’m sorry for the animals that used to live there.” She smiled wanly at us, touched the mini-iPod’s blank face, and then rode home in her car service.
We sat on the front lawn. Not Indian-style like we’d been doing. This time we made sure not to sit that way, except Bananas. Bananas always sat that way. We considered cutting down the totems. They were weird. Here it was, the flipside. “Don’t listen to Grandma,” Bananas said, “she just felt left out. We should have invited her and asked her what she wanted to do.” Neighbors watched us from their windows. I looked at online plane tickets. We agreed to sleep inside and evaluate the totems in the morning. We didn’t realize they’d be evaluated every morning. By cars and neighbors, by the original tree carvers, pecked at by birds, traveled by ants. You cannot remove a monument, everything moves around it.
* * *
Grandma’s earlier style of dying turned into a more advanced, un-stylish dying. We took turns waiting with her. “I’m not sure which I’m more attracted to,” I said to her, “boys or dogs.” She was only ten percent awake. I said, “I keep crashing my car, just so me and Dad will have something to fix.” She opened one eye and then snapped it shut. I poked at the little pills in their order. “They got rid of Florida,” I told her, “you can’t move there now. Just broke it off.”
Two girls my age came in and started getting involved. Hospice, the ones who brought the bed with a remote control. They were dressed in lace and black. They asked, “What have you done to the pills?” I had arranged the week’s medicine in color order. The yellows to red to blue. The girls scowled. They had black nail polish. I excused myself and walked into Grandma’s bathroom. “Mom,” I whispered to my phone, “what kind of association is this? I swear they are two goth girls.” I tried to explain goth to Mom over the phone, “Like Shakespeare?” she asked. “No, different,” I said, “They love death. Like their whole life is to prepare and get used to death, to, and, and to dress dramatic. They avoid certain things. They only have a few friends. Usually. They hate their parents, usually.”
I caught one hospice girl looking through the closet and pushed the sliding door shut. “She’s not dead yet,” I said, “Plus, you aren’t getting those clothes for your thrift store! I’m going to get those clothes and be my own living ghost. Grand! In the old style! You get it?” These girls should not have been touching Grandma. Each moment of her was waning. I looked at her for resemblance. A life is enormous.
These girls were like people in line at the grocery store. Getting unfamiliar foods. Foods I never buy.
The other girl was poised above Grandma. “Don’t do anything weird,” I said.
“I’m not,” said the girl.
I reorganized the nightstand how me and Grandma liked it. I sat down in my waiting chair and stared into the black eyes of the girls, “Don’t try to manipulate souls. We are both solid Jews in here. We don’t believe in anything but life.”