Rules for Being Dead Page 2
— CLARKE —
SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 1966
We finally got to go back to the movies today, except it was tonight. And it was at the drive-in instead of the Ritz, but it was still a movie up on a screen, and that’s what counts. And it counts even more that it was the drive-in because that’s where we saw our last movie ever with Momma, the night before she died. Jeanne Dixon, who’s famous because she tells the future and sees ghosts on TV, says that it takes time for a spirit to depart. I hope so, because maybe that means Momma’s still hanging around there. Just in case, I made our cousin Beverly park her car exactly where Momma had parked that last night. But even in the right spot, we didn’t see Momma’s ghost, we just saw Elvis Presley and Donna Douglas in Frankie and Johnny.
Elvis plays a gambler on an old-timey showboat, and he wears a floweredy vest, which is what they wore back then but also what “mod people” wear now because sometimes fashions come back like that. Momma got me a floweredy vest this Christmas to go with my Beatles belt and Beatles boots and paisley shirt, so I get to be Paul in our Beatles club at school. Also because my bangs hang down. When Daddy let us go back to school this week, the other Beatles gave me a sympathy card, but I think their mothers picked it out for them and made them sign it. Everybody says they have “sympathy” for us, but it’s easier just to give us a card. It’s like Beverly and her boyfriend Randy taking us to the drive-in. That’s their way of saying they have sympathy without having to say anything at all. We can just look up at the screen and let the people there do all the talking.
But Beverly and Randy did start talking when they thought we weren’t listening because they were in the back seat making out. Beverly’s a senior in high school, and they get to do stuff like that. Corey and I were in the front. When Beverly came up for air, I heard her say something funny happened in our house. Not funny like when you laugh, but funny like when you whisper a secret.
“Pooch tried to find this bottle of blue pills that Aunt Creola used to take, but she couldn’t find ’em. They’re missing.”
Beverly calls her mother Pooch, like a dog. She calls her sister Carolyn Cabbage because she likes to eat stuffed cabbage and cole slaw, which is made from cabbage. They all call Beverly Wheezer because she has asthma and has to use an atomizer to breathe.
“Pooch wanted to cut Aunt Creola open to see what was inside her, but L.E. wouldn’t let her.”
L.E. is our father’s name, for Lloyd Edwin, which doesn’t fit him at all.
“Pooch said, ‘We could get a court order and have Aunt Creola’s body exhumed.’”
“Your mom needs to have her head exhumed.” That’s the only thing Randy said. I could tell he wanted to go back to kissing, not talking.
“Exhumed” is like “examined” but with dug up added in.
In the rearview mirror, I saw Beverly hold up her thumb and finger about four inches apart, like she was holding an invisible pill bottle between them. It’s the same as when Aunt Altha held up her hand at the funeral home to show how red ink was still on Momma’s hand, even though she was just looking at thin air. Daddy says “seeing things that aren’t there” runs in our mother’s side of the family.
I closed my eyes to make the inside of my head see something that wasn’t there—Momma’s pills—and then I blinked extra hard to make myself remember to look for them when I got back home. That’s a trick Mrs. Frye taught us this year, for how to remember things. You think of something like Elvis from the movie, then you think of what you want to remember, then you put an equal sign between them. Then you close your eyes and blink extra hard like you’re clicking a camera to take a picture, and the thing shows up behind your eyelids like this: “Elvis = pills.” So when I glue the ad for Frankie and Johnny in my scrapbook tonight and see “It’s Elvis” at the top, I’ll think of the missing pills and remember to look for them.
It’s neat when something you have to learn in school can be used in real life.
— CREOLA —
Besides my boys, I think that I’m going to miss Elvis movies most of all. He was my personal tour guide for all of the places L.E. never took me. Blue Hawaii, Fun in Acapulco, Viva Las Vegas. I got to see the world with Elvis who, believe me, is a lot more fun than L.E. turned out to be. I’d come back from one of his movies, having dragged the boys with me, and then I’d assign a bulletin board based on it to my class, just to keep my pretend vacation going a little bit longer. The students never knew my secret: they thought I was actually teaching them something, but I was just thinking about Elvis and his pelvis, which is not something grade-school teachers are supposed to be thinking about. My kiddos would be struggling away, chewing their plump little lips at the corners, their chubby fingers cutting out the imports and exports of Hawaii from old Look magazines I’d bring in from home, while I was daydreaming about surfboards and ukuleles and Elvis in his bathing suit.
I watched the boys in that car with Beverly and Randy tonight while I was balancing up on top of the drive-in movie screen, forty feet up in the air. That’s becoming one of my favorite new places to be, maybe because I spent so much time there when I was still alive. Day or night, it doesn’t matter, I sit on top of that screen and look out around me, and I’m happy, for just a little while. I don’t stray too far from home yet, from what I know, still too afraid to venture out much. I float back and forth between the Cottage Hill Cemetery and Woodleigh Drive. It doesn’t feel like two weeks have gone by since I died, more like twenty minutes. Time is different … here. Wherever here is. Wherever I am. Fast and slow, at the same time. And not just that, but it’s stretching way into the future. Like waaaayyyy, which is something Clarke will write in the … well, future.
So there’s that. (Which is another thing Clarke will write.) Yes, in addition to flying, I seem to have developed an ability to see what will happen years, even decades from now.
There will be something called Facebook. And Twitter. And Instagram. And emojis. And abbreviations. Lots of abbreviations. LOL. ROTFL. RIMCL. Rolling in my coffin laughing.
I wish I could be there to see it.
I wish I could have seen my future, so I could have stopped it. Whatever it is that stopped me. I’m getting better at being dead, I guess, but I’m not getting any better about missing the boys and all the things we did together.
I tried to make them both feel my presence tonight at the drive-in, to let them know I was still there for them. I rattled the speaker in the rolled-down window of Beverly’s car and kept turning the volume up and down, but they just kept hitting the metal box to make it work right. The speaker kept going out the last time I was here with the boys, the night before I died, so I thought that would remind them. But it didn’t. It only reminded me.
Tammy and the Bachelor. The drive-in. The night before I died.
It was almost April, and it didn’t get dark until late, so the movies didn’t start till late—so the boys slept through most of it. I usually didn’t take them on a school night, but that night was different. (Well, it was different because it was the night before I died, but it was different for some other reason too. Only I can’t remember.)
I’d seen the movie years before, on the third or fourth leave their father had spent in town. It wasn’t until his ninth leave that L.E. had proposed to me, already an old maid at just twenty-seven, on a three-penny postcard. He was too bashful to ask in person and too cheap for a proper envelope. A marriage proposal on the back of a postcard, in the tiniest print imaginable:
Creola—
I’m not good with words, so I’m not going to make this long. I’ve known a lot of women, the ones who can get past the scar on my leg. I was flat on my back for so long, waiting for my leg to heal when I was little, so I know what waiting is like. I can’t wait that long ever again, for you to say yes. I want us to be married, and I want us to have kids. I get out of the Army soon. I don’t know
what comes after that. Not Vermont, I know that much. And I know it won’t be in the kitchen. I’ll cook for you once a week, but none of the recipes I’ve learned here on KP duty. I’ve had it with dishing out shit on a shingle for a bunch of hungry guys who can’t manage to say “Thank you.” Maybe I can do something with electronics. I like using my hands and making things work. Maybe a farm, with a pond and a house I’ll build with my own two hands. If you’ll just have me, I promise you carousels and Tilt-A-Whirls and tornadoes of love.
L.E.
He didn’t realize how scary that sounded: “tornadoes of love.” He’d thought he was writing a love poem that didn’t rhyme. I thought so too.
My last night on earth, watching Tammy again at the drive-in, was completely different, with two little boys instead of a man who didn’t love me anymore. I’d gotten scooted to the middle of the front seat: Corey had his head in my lap from one side, Clarke the other. They’d conked out at how old-fashioned it was; thank God they weren’t awake to see their old mother crying herself silly at an old movie that reminded her of a time when she was happy. (Forty-four. And I already felt as ancient as the boys probably thought I was. They had two words for parents: “new” and “old.” I wasn’t the first one.) A teenager from the concession stand shined his flashlight at us because we were the only car left in the parking lot after the final credits. A big embarrassed grin came over his face when he saw that it was me and realized I had taught him, years before.
“Oh my gosh, Mrs. Perkins, I didn’t know it was you.”
“That’s okay, I hardly know who I am anymore anyway.” I tried to make a sound like a laugh, but I started crying even harder.
“You stay as long as you like. My mother cries at old movies too.”
Old. See? There it was, everywhere I went.
Monkey Boy. That was his name, at least the only one I could remember. I’d had to take him to the principal’s office one Valentine’s Day because he climbed up a tree at recess and threw mud at one of the girls. Later he’d confessed to me that it had been an act of love. He’d given her a box of Russell Stover chocolates, but she’d told him he looked like a monkey and gave the candy to somebody else. Monkey Boy started crying in front of me—like I’d just done in front of him—and from then on, he became one of my secret favorites. It’s odd the things I remember about my students: the first time one of them fell in love with another; the first time one of them fell in love with me; the way they always acted so bashful and out-of-place when they saw me away from school, at the grocery store, or downtown on the square. On the Day of Judgment, I used to think, I’d fail if I couldn’t repeat all of their names. It would mean I hadn’t been a good enough teacher.
And here I am—dead, but still waiting for judgment.
I guess “Monkey Boy” will have to do for now.
That night we finally left the drive-in parking lot—Monkey Boy waving his flashlight into the night sky behind us—and I drove home, leaving the drive-in dust and gravel behind us.
There’s not much to see out there on the edge of town where the drive-in is, but because of God’s little postmortem party trick of turning me into the Amazing Kreskin, I can see what it will become. (It’s like His joke: like He held out His two closed fists to me and said, “Creola, pick one. You can either see the past and what killed you, or you can see the future. But you can’t see both. At least not yet.” I must have picked the one that held the future; I knew that was the only way I was going to be able to keep up with what happens to the boys.) The Haggar Slacks factory will be built soon, sewing machines and steam presses going nonstop, jobs for so many women in town, the mothers of my students. The only job in this town for women besides being teachers. A sacred calling of a different sort. The roller rink tent will come into town on an empty plot of land out there every summer. The only time you won’t hear rented skates on that make-shift wooden floor will be on Sunday nights when it’s reserved for revival meetings. The boys will be there on Saturday and Sunday nights.
When Clarke is in fifth grade, next year, Rhonda Sue Lewis will draw him a diagram of how to skate while they’re supposed to be reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond during quiet time, and they’ll both get in trouble shuffling their sheet of lined notebook paper back and forth. Clarke will get sad in a way that Rhonda Sue can’t understand. Sad at me—and mad too—for being gone. He’ll think that I should have been the one to teach him how to skate. He’ll get mad a lot. He’ll lie to Mrs. Laird, the music teacher who comes in once a week, that he knows how to play Für Elise on the piano for the school talent show, and then when he can’t play it, he’ll blow up. He’ll overhear her say he has a “short fuse.”
He will have a short fuse for the rest of his life.
I’ll get mad too—at God—every time something bad happens to Clarke or Corey and I’m not there to comfort them. I’ll get mad that I took them to Tammy and the Bachelor my last night on earth instead of staying up with them and telling them everything I knew, everything I wanted them to know to protect themselves, that I could squeeze into my last few hours.
Which I can’t remember.
— CLARKE —
SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 1966
Every Saturday at noon, Daddy comes home from work to make us lunch and to eat his lunch too. He’s tired from selling furniture and appliances all morning, so he takes a nap in the lounge chair while Corey and I play outside. Sometimes when he’s sleeping I sneak back in and look at him and wonder how we got such an old father, forty-five, when all the other fathers we know are young. He almost looks like Brian Keith from Family Affair, but the worn-out version that would never be on a TV show. The week after Momma died, I saw him looking at his face in the bathroom mirror. He pulled back his droopy skin and put a dark brown washrag on top of his light brown hair, which he wears sticking straight up like Frankie Avalon’s. Then he pulled himself up and turned around so he could see sideways in the mirror. He sucked in his stomach and puffed out his chest and pulled back a handful of tee shirt to hold it all in, but then he got normal again because it was too hard to not breathe. He let go of his tee shirt. He took the washrag off his head and put it in the dirty-clothes hamper. He looked at himself some more, then reached back in the hamper. I thought he was going to put the washrag back on his head, but he pulled out a whiskey bottle hidden under the dirty clothes and started drinking instead. That’s his favorite hiding place, but he’s got a lot of them.
One of them is up in the cabinet above the washing machine in the kitchen, where I was making Corey dessert while Daddy was taking his nap. I got out vanilla wafers and strawberry jelly and mini marshmallows and told Corey we could play like we were having “canapés,” like rich people do in movies. To get the fancy silver tray Momma used to use, I stood on top of the washing machine and reached up into the cabinet over it. Something knocked over, something rattly. I knew it wasn’t Daddy’s bottle because that would sound liquidy. I reached inside and pulled it out, and it was Momma’s little pill bottle, not Daddy’s big drinking bottle.
My eyes blinked, and then I remembered. Elvis = pills, and now so does Momma.
There’s something weird about the pills being all the way up in the cabinet in the kitchen, where she couldn’t get to them fast enough if she needed them. Beverly says funny, I say weird, but I think we mean the same thing. Funnyweird. I gave Corey his canapés to keep him quiet, then took the pills to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom where medicine is supposed to go. I put the pill bottle on the shelf, but I kept the pills for myself so I could show Aunt Altha they weren’t missing anymore. That way, she’d know nothing funny or weird happened in our house. I don’t like people thinking we’re funny.
I closed the medicine cabinet door and saw myself in the mirror on the front of it. For just a second, I thought it was finally Momma’s ghost, because I look so much like her. That’s what everybody says. She was short and had dark hair and eyes that could change from gray to green. So do I. When she smile
d, she didn’t open her mouth because she always had lipstick smeared on her teeth. I don’t open my mouth when I smile, but that’s because my teeth have big gaps in them.
I walked backwards out of the bathroom so I could keep looking at the mirror and play like I was looking at her. The further away I got, the littler her face got. One more step back and she’d be so little she’d completely disappear, but then a giant stomped in and scared her away.
It was Daddy, and he was big and screaming and dragging Corey with him. Corey’s face was covered with blood, only it was strawberry jelly. Daddy’s face was as red as Corey’s, only it was the blood inside him. He pulled me into the kitchen where everything was smeared with strawberry jelly blood from the mess Corey had made. I snapped my eyes shut to keep from seeing it, and there it was again.
Elvis = pills, and so does Momma.
“Where are the missing pills?” I remembered and yelled, to keep Daddy from screaming at me the way he does when he’s drunk and I’m afraid there will be real blood.
“What?”
“Beverly said Aunt Altha said you wouldn’t let them cut her open to find them.”
“Jesus Christ on a goddamn crutch, Clarke …”
“Didn’t her pills help?”
“What pills?”
“The ones Aunt Altha was looking for.” I almost said that I just found, but I didn’t.
He almost turned into the Daddy he wants to be, all puffed up and big and young and strong, but he took a breath and just stayed the Daddy he is. “Let’s get this mess cleaned up and get you boys to your movie. We’ll deal with pills and your Aunt Altha tomorrow. I’d like to give her some pills.” He whispered that last part, but I heard it anyway.
P.S. There was another ghost at the Ritz today, but I wasn’t afraid to see this one. It was The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, and Daddy said that a movie with “ghost” and “invisible bikini” both in the title is not meant to be scary. But I think he’s just trying to be nice to us now to make up from when he got so mad. He picked us up at the Ritz after work, then we came home, then we had dinner, then we went to bed. That’s where I’m writing this now, in bed. When Daddy goes in the bathroom, I hear him open the medicine cabinet because the door makes a rusty metal sound, but then I don’t hear anything. Maybe he’s just standing there, wondering where Momma’s pill bottle came from that wasn’t there before, and where the four pills are, that were there but aren’t there now, because they’re with me.