“First off,” Izzy says, “you’re a salaried employee so you’ll be paid for the whole day. Trust me, it will all work out in the end. There will be plenty of days when you put in way more than eight hours without getting a cent of overtime.
“Secondly, don’t worry about needing an appointment. Barbara loves drop-ins. In fact, all of her customers are drop-ins of a sort. Let me make a quick phone call.”
Two minutes later he’s back. “You’re all set. Barbara is expecting you around two-thirty. Which should give us just enough time to finish eating. I’ll drop you off on the way.”
“Wow. I’m impressed.”
“I have connections,” Izzy says cryptically, wiggling those wooly caterpillars.
Chapter 13
Forty minutes later I am stuffed with Chinese food and wedged into the front seat of Izzy’s car on my way to Barbara. Despite being in the perfect position for floating in amniotic fluid, I’m feeling pretty chipper. The prospect of both a new dress and a new hairdo has me jazzed until Izzy pulls up in front of the Keller Funeral Home.
“You’ll find Barbara inside,” he says. “Probably in the basement. That’s where she does most of her work.”
“Izzy, this is a funeral home.”
“I know.”
I swivel my chin on my knees and look at him. “Barbara works in a funeral home?”
“Yeah, she does hair and makeup. I’ve seen her work. It’s very good. She’s really quite talented.”
“But this is a funeral home,” I persist. I feel like I’m in one of those episodes of The Twilight Zone where I’m the only person who gets it.
“Well, yeah. Didn’t I mention that?”
I give him a dirty look. “You know damn well you didn’t.”
“That’s why there’s no waiting. Her regular clients aren’t in any hurry.”
“Very funny. Dead humor.” I roll my eyes and want to kick him. But I can’t move my legs. “You expect me to get my hair done by a woman who’s a beautician for corpses?”
“Give her a try. I’m telling you, she’s good. She went to beauty school and all that, although she had to drop out before she finished. That’s why she’s working here. But she didn’t drop out because of a lack of talent. Trust me, Mattie. Give it a shot.” He eyes my hair and shudders. “I mean, what have you got to lose?”
There ya go. Both barrels. With my ego blown to bits, I pry myself out of the car and stand on the sidewalk shifting from one foot to the other in a futile effort to get some feeling back in my legs. I know that if I try to walk now I’ll have that Herman Munster gait again, something the funeral home folks may think a bit rude.
I open my mouth to protest one last time, but Izzy says, “I’ll be back in about an hour and a half. Have fun!” And with that he guns the gas and peels off down the street, leaving me standing there alone in front of Keller’s. I turn and eye the building a moment before figuring what the hell and heading inside.
The main entrance leads into a large open foyer with several doors lining either side. It is eerily quiet, the thick carpet and acoustic walls absorbing every sound. I suppose that is so the wails and sobs of the bereaved won’t travel too far, but that doesn’t make it any less creepy. I’ve never liked funeral homes. There’s something so tiptoey awkward about them, as if the dead might be offended if someone were to stomp their feet, or yell, or laugh.
No way am I heading to the basement by myself so, instead, I head for a door marked OFFICE, where I find an elderly woman sitting behind a desk. Her face looks like one of those dried-apple dolls: all wrinkled and shriveled and brown. She has tissue-paper skin covered with liver spots and bruises, and her knuckles are gnarled and deformed from arthritis. Her shoulders are rounded by a dowager’s hump, making it difficult for her to look straight ahead.
Upon seeing me, she flashes a sympathetic smile, and then pushes herself out of the chair. I hear a loud creak and wonder if it’s coming from her joints or the furniture. Once on her feet, she stands a second, wavering like a reed in the wind before beginning a slow shuffle around the desk. Somehow she manages to shift a box of tissues closer to me as she moves.
“Hello,” she says softly. “Can I help you?”
Her help me? She looks to be at least a hundred and, if my nursing eye still works, she’s about one pill away from multi-system failure.
“It’s okay,” I say, holding up a hand to stop her. Her slow progression is too painful to watch. “I’m not here for a funeral or anything.” Although, the more I look at her…
She stops, frowns, and then glances up at my hair. “Oh, yes,” she says, flashing me a smile of relief. “You’re here for Barbara, aren’t you? And not a second too soon either, I might add.” She studies me a moment longer, then shakes her head, though I’m not sure if the movement is a judgment or a palsy of some sort. “That color is all wrong for your skin. You’re so pale. It makes you look washed-out,” she says.
This from a woman who looks like she is made out of onionskin paper.
“I’m fair, not pale,” I protest. “My hair got darker as I got older. This”—I finger the dyed ends of my hair—“happens to be the color I was born with.”
She scoffs at that. “You were also born with creases in your thighs and a misshapen head. Do you want those back, too?”
I glare at her and ask, “Is Barbara here?”
“She’s downstairs. Go back out to the foyer and through the door all the way in the back on the right. Down the stairs and ring the buzzer. We keep it locked, you know. Wouldn’t do to have families wandering around down there and coming across all the bodies.”
She seems rather glib for a woman who is frighteningly close to being a body herself. I thank her and hurry back out to the foyer, wanting to escape before she starts her journey back to the chair.
As I move toward the door she indicated, I glance into the rooms on either side of me. In one of them an open coffin is set up on a stand at the front of the room. There are several rows of chairs lined up, but except for the resident of the coffin, the room is empty. I look around, see no one, and venture inside.
Despite the fact that I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies in my work at the hospital and am likely to see plenty more now that I work with Izzy, I’ve never been to a funeral with an open casket. I’ve heard comments from others about how “life-like” the bodies look and always figured some kind of miracle occurred between the time when I saw them freshly dead and the bereaved saw them at a funeral. But this is the first prepared dead body I’ve ever seen with my own eyes and it’s one I’ve seen before.
Laid out before me is Ingrid Swenson, the woman with the bashed-in head, my first official autopsy. The difference in her appearance between then and now is nothing short of startling, so much so that I almost don’t recognize her. I mean she is dead—that is obvious—there is a certain lifeless quality to her that no makeup or hair style can hide. But her skin looks soft and dewy, her eyes are perfectly shaded, and her cheeks bear an ironically rosy glow. There is nary a hint of the discoloration, swelling, and bruising I saw in her face when Izzy and I autopsied her.
The crowning glory, however, is her hair. At the autopsy it was stained with blood—dirty, dingy, and as lifeless as the rest of her. But now it is lustrously blonde, gleaming with ironic health and streaked with subtle high-and lowlights. It is straight near her scalp—the incision Izzy made totally invisible—and curled at the ends, the soft curves laying about her face and shoulders in a perfect frame. It strikes me as incredibly sad to waste such a good-hair day on being dead.