Funerals for Horses (retail) Read online

  “But Andy wouldn’t be dead. Would he?”

  “Of course he would. Without me? Absolutely he would. What would he be without me? No, without me, the only thing left for Andy is a decent burial.”

  I made my sister DeeDee a solemn promise.

  When I woke the next day she was gone, to school I assumed, and Andy was a lump under the edge of my pillow.

  Mom didn’t notice when DeeDee forgot to come home. Simon said she ran away, but he knew better, I think. He liked to think the best.

  I told him about Andy, about the promise, and we found a flashlight and set out around bedtime, sorting a careful grid on the three-acre woodlot behind our house until we found her.

  I was glad I couldn’t see Simon’s face as we stood beneath that tree, flashlight drooped in his hand, listening to the sickening creak of rope on tree limb as the breeze blew through.

  I asked my brother Simon if we call the fire department for something like this.

  DO NOT CROSS

  I locate my approximate goal by landmark. The sun glares into my unblinking eyes, and I pull my hat brim down to shield them. I probably should think I’m standing someplace beautiful.

  The hill slopes away beneath my feet, the grass winter green, the sky a perfect cloudless blue contrast. Everywhere I look I see trees. I have never been fond of trees. Well, not never, but not for a long time.

  Now I see a small brown rabbit. He stares at me. I stare back. I take a step toward him, thinking he will run. He holds his ground, staring. He turns, lopes a few rabbit steps away, and looks over his shoulder at me.

  I walk the other way.

  It’s the hawk that turns me back again, away from the direction I think I should travel.

  He spreads his great patterned wings and glides from tree to tree, and I trot along, afraid, as always, that life will happen too fast and I will be left behind.

  I catch my foot and go sprawling.

  I scrape my chin on a rock, and as it bleeds onto my shirt, I notice it’s a strip of wood that snagged me. Not a natural strip, as one might expect out here, but a carefully cut and milled piece of narrow lumber, sticking straight up out of the ground.

  I stand, wipe my chin on my shoulder and stamp the grass down all around my find.

  I walk a pattern, rolling out in ever-widening circles until I find another. I clear the grass aside to discover a knot of plastic tape still attached, as if the remainder had been carelessly torn away, with a little tail flapping in the breeze.

  The tail contains bits of faded words: DO NOT CR

  Within minutes I’ve paced off the four corners of the site. The fourth stick also contains a strip of police tape. It says: LINE DO N

  I remember the first time I ever saw my brother Simon cry. We stood under a scrub oak, something like the one above me now, holding the little board box Simon had made for Andy. We were affording Andy his promised proper burial, the day after the police tape disappeared from around that tree.

  “How do you cry, Simon?”

  I was so in awe of him, the things he could do that seemed like foreign currency to me. Shoot baskets. Bench press seventy pounds. Cry.

  “I don’t know,” he said, wiping his eyes and nose on his sleeve. “You just do.”

  I bend now to touch the sun-bleached scrap of tape, afraid to walk into the rectangle of my brother’s misfortune.

  How do you cry, Ella? You just do. But my stomach is tight, my head tingly, my eyes dry, and I just don’t.

  I step inside, to the center of the area, now clean of my brother’s clothes, long since entered into evidence when a scruffy rider of the rails found himself in custody for attempting to pass Simon’s checks.

  I sit down hard to ease my dizziness. The hawk screams at me.

  I feel a sense of lightness, which is very much what I feared. I feel a release, an end to worldly tension, to remorse. I feel a letting go. I suppose this could mean two things. Simon has left this world. Or, wherever he is, Simon is happy.

  If Simon has left this world, I will walk off the edge soon enough myself.

  I hear DeeDee’s voice in my head, as I have often since Simon’s disappearance, as if she must speak louder with only one sibling to listen.

  She says, but you wouldn’t be dead. Would you? Of course I would. Without Simon? Absolutely I would. What would I be without Simon?

  I decide that, wherever Simon is now, he is happy.

  THEN:

  Our mother attended the funeral only because our father dressed and dragged her. He stood in the middle of her bedroom, supported her around the waist with one arm and slipped a black dress over her head with his free hand.

  We only peeked in for brief moments at a time, skittering back and forth from living room to bedroom, wondering which was the worse spot to light.

  In the living room was our father’s lady friend, and both halves of that term only loosely applied to Sheila, transfixed by the task of polishing her nails. She wore her hair piled on her head like an exotic dancer or a waitress, her skirt too short. Long after our father had loaded Mom into the passenger seat of his new car, Simon and I respectfully silent in the back seat, I pictured Sheila, long legs crossed, extending one hand with spread fingers, blowing on the wet polish.

  “Isn’t this a lovely day for a wedding, Gabe?” our mother chirped as he pulled away from the curb.

  “We’re not going to a wedding, Betty, we’re going to our daughter’s funeral.”

  She turned her face to him, showing us her warm smile in profile. “This will be just like old times for us, won’t it, Gabe?”

  She patted his cheek.

  Our father said nothing, just shot Simon a sidewise glance, as if my brother had intentionally withheld details of our mother’s decline, as if it had always been Simon’s job to keep the measurements and tell the tales.

  I retained only one detail of DeeDee’s memorial service. I felt I should remember every nuance as a way of proving I would never become my mother.

  But only this one moment remained.

  The rabbi, standing before the bereaved, announced that we gathered to mourn the tragic loss of Deborah Naomi Ginsberg.

  Simon and I exchanged a glance.

  Nobody, but nobody, called DeeDee “Deborah,” despite the fact that it was her given name. In DeeDee’s world, people could be maimed for lesser transgressions.

  There was a time when I truly believed that I stood and offered the proper correction aloud, with such firm authority that the rabbi could hardly do other than to apologize to our sister’s lost soul. I ran it by Simon years later, who informed me, with tenderness, that we both sat frozen and lifeless, and uttered not so much as a peep.

  I felt engulfed in hopelessness at that moment on my sister DeeDee’s behalf. Imagine DeeDee, of all people, forced to lie in a box and endure such insult without recourse. Surely death is the most helpless and irrevocable of states.

  Simon cried. My father wiped his own eyes in nervous, twitchy little motions, as if he might dissociate from the action. My mother clutched his arm, or knee, or both, gazing at him lovingly.

  Beyond that, I remember only a mental veil, a kind of blankness, like the white noise of after-hours television before the test pattern arrives.

  Later that night, long after ten, Simon and I crawled out onto the roof of our house, through the attic window and on into the night, and stared across the wreckage.

  We perched at the apex, carefully straddling the shingled slopes for balance, and the moon sat in its own yellowish glow on the horizon.

  Our mother’s ancient Studebaker stood where it always stood, parked at the curb, collecting pine needles, waiting for nothing. The cracked, charcoaled support beams that had once been our garage lay at crazy angles, shiny in their blackness. Beyond this stretched the three-acre woodlot, its trees appearing more twisted, more darkly gnarled than before, like the netherworlds and dark forests of fantasy tales I wouldn’t read for years to come.

  “Not
hing seems very different, Simon, does it?”

  He didn’t answer, and I heard the question ring back through my ears and wondered if I understood it myself. Everything was different. Yet somehow, in a way I couldn’t explain, I wanted the loss of DeeDee to change something that appeared unchanged. Maybe I wanted the moon to stop in its orbit, or the day never to arrive. Maybe I wanted to be a different person without her, instead of what I was, myself, only more beaten, less direct.

  Just for a moment I wanted Andy back. Though I knew I’d never defile his grave, I felt pinched between her wishes and my own desire to hold on.

  “Nothing will ever be the same,” he said at last.

  “But if we just go on, like we’re doing,” I said, “then why was she even here? If she can just be subtracted, what was she? Why did she even go to all the trouble?”

  Simon turned half around and slid down the roof a ways to rest his back at an angle against the slope, his knees bent, feet braced for stability, his head dropped back to face the stars.

  I did the same.

  “We’ll keep her with us,” he said.

  An outsider, overhearing this remark, might have taken it as a bland, sappy comment about the dead living on in the hearts of those who loved them. That wasn’t what he meant. Simon and I spoke in a kind of shorthand.

  From that moment, DeeDee would exist between us in a freakishly tangible way. We would consult her before making decisions, talk and listen to her with respect, leave room for her in all physical spaces and in every personal exchange. I comforted myself by thinking that this did not make us at all like our mother, because, unlike her, we recognized the arrangement as a poor second. We admitted it to be a fractional salvage of loss.

  Our father stayed the night, packed Sheila into a cab the following morning and sent her away alone.

  He picked up the telephone receiver and left it glued to his ear, only pressing the button to hang up between calls.

  I sat on the landing of the stairs with my brother Simon, magically relieved of our responsibility to school, which I suppose was something of what I wanted in suggesting that morning had no right to come. We listened to every conversation, and although cryptic, heard only from his end, a pattern emerged.

  “Yes, Manny,” our father would say, “it’s worse than I thought. No, worse than that. No, nobody said a word to me—the kids never said a thing. No wonder it was such a strain on the girl, god keep her... Well, I know, Manny, but I’m her ex-husband. I know that, but I’m the children’s father. Well, somebody has to— that’s my point, that’s all I’m really trying to say.... No, I called her long distance. She hung up on me, that’s what. Like this is a big surprise. Then I called back but she wouldn’t answer. You know how much she hates me. You know what she said to me, Manny? Before she hung up? Before I could even tell her what I’d called to say, Manny? She said, ‘What daughter? I have no daughter’.... I know—that’s exactly what I said. But you know what she’s like. . . . Not living, no. . . . Well, somebody has to, that’s my point. That’s all I’m trying to say.... Well, me, of course. I mean, somebody has to take care of them. They’re kids. They can’t raise themselves.”

  My brother Simon and I stared into each other’s eyes, and at the walls, alternately, feeling a sense of the unspoken factor, searching for some clarification of it in our mutual understanding.

  Then a number of additional calls, in a tone more formal.

  “I’m calling to inquire about your facility.... Well, how much of that would the state pay... ? I see.”

  In the morning he sat us down, said our mother had a sickness that didn’t show. Didn’t show, I thought. You don’t spend much time around here. But I maintained a measured silence.

  We were not invited to come along for the ride.

  Uncle Manny—big, hearty, unflappable Uncle Manny—came to stay with us while our father flew home to pack and ship his belongings.

  While we waited, we bundled and hauled stacks of sports sections to the front yard. If we had cared to, we could have stacked them high enough to obscure the house from the street, but we only made a series of loose mounds, which happy Boy Scouts dragged away.

  Simon and I moved into a common room in the attic, because my father felt comfortable in the privacy afforded by owning the entire second floor.

  We’d lie in bed at night and wonder aloud about the safety, indeed the purpose, of asking where our mother had been taken, and whether or not visits could be arranged.

  DeeDee said we should be smart for a change, and ask no questions at all. In just a matter of weeks, our new way of life sketched itself out in painful detail, leaving no room for confusion. We decided without prearrangement that DeeDee’s opinions were the most solid of the three, and should be accepted as a tiebreaker, or in any situation in which stress or doubt might cloud our limited, living vision.

  Our father installed a lock on the outside of the attic door to assure we would not stumble downstairs after lights out.

  Night after night we collected auditory data.

  The front door opening and closing long after midnight, too many times a night. Voices, always strange, never overlapping. Three, four, five new voices all at once. Sounds—human, we assumed, though some frighteningly close to the border between human and animal, between pleasure and pain. Laughter. Bed springs. Or couch springs. A gentle trying of our door. Because, you see, our father had installed a real deadbolt, not just a hook on the outside of the door, but a lock that we could not open from the inside, and that no one on the outside could open, except our father with his key.

  “Well, Ella,” Simon said one night, “you said you wanted everything to change.”

  As is so often the case, by the time I realized that my wish had been answered, it was far too late for retraction.

  THE EVE OF SETTING OFF

  In a dusty corner of a defunct service station, near a wall of treadless tires, I phone Raphael from a phone booth out of sight and earshot of every living thing except me—and the pieces of people I’ve carried along.

  “Ella.” His voice clarifies my reasons for calling. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you again.”

  “Well, you might not,” I say. “After this.”

  I want to tell him that my new earth is dry, the sky too wide. I want to tell him I know what I have to do now, but it’s hard. Because I can’t take any comfort with me, not even my friendly old truck, which is why I need the comfort of his voice on the eve of setting off.

  Instead I say, “I’ve decided Simon’s alive.” I don’t know that he is, I’ve simply decided it, and I’m sure Raphael hears that in my voice, although he knows me well enough to guess it. “I’ve decided he walked out of this place on his own feet.”

  “Naked?”

  “Naked? I don’t know. Maybe. Or in a change of clothes.” Raphael doesn’t ask why my brother would do that, which is a blessing, because there’s no reason I can offer. Still, I’ve decided.

  For a moment Raphael asks nothing at all, and I watch the hot wind swirl a weak dust devil in the brown, empty soil of nowhere.

  Then he says, “So what will you do?”

  “I’ll start walking,” I say, as if it’s so simple I can’t imagine the need to spell it out.

  “Good luck,” he says, but I hear what he doesn’t say, too. Still, you can’t judge a man by what he doesn’t say, even if you can hear it.

  “I love you, Raphael.”

  “I know that. I never doubted that, Ella.”

  I touch the phone lightly back to its receiver, as if afraid of a spark at contact.

  I climb into the old truck for the last time and head into the dusk. Before I park it one final time, I wish it a good life. I wish for it to be stolen by someone who needs it, and I leave the keys.

  I take only the pocketknife that Simon gave me when I was eleven, a sleeping bag with one change of clothes rolled inside, toothbrush, comb, a small picture of Simon, and all the money I own. I also bring Simon,
a piece of Sarah, DeeDee, and what’s left of myself, but these things don’t weigh me down.

  I camp the night within the rectangle of stakes and ask my dreams to point me.

  I have no dreams.

  I clutch the sleeping bag around my neck in the night, awakened from time to time by a sharp, chill wind across my cheek. The ground pinches my hip and I toss around.

  In the morning I am hungry and thirsty, and I have no plans for these needs. In fact, I have no plans.

  I lie still as long as I can, and I notice a brown rabbit watching me from under a bush. The same rabbit, or another one, I don’t know. This land must contain a million rabbit lookalikes.

  When the hawk screams I sit up.

  I watch him perch in the tree above me and crook his neck to stare, watch his round black eye contain me doubtfully. Still, I think he doubts me less than I doubt myself.

  He glides away on a cushion of air, and I stand and take a few steps after him, and as I do, I am surer than ever that my brother Simon continued from this place.

  My challenge is to continue in the same direction.

  The hawk lights in a tree and waits while I pack my only remaining physical symptoms of life.

  THEN:

  One advantage to living with our father was a freedom to stay home from school unnoticed. We’d trudge out of the house at the regular hour and head anywhere else. He’d set off for work a minute later, leaving us free to come home, usually to take the sleep we missed at night. Simon forged beautiful notes.

  On Jewish holidays we simply slept in.

  “Why aren’t you in school?” he’d say when we came down to breakfast.

  “It’s Yom Kippur.”

  “You don’t go to temple, you should go to school.”

  Here, oddly, I played spokesperson.

  “Wouldn’t make a difference. They mark us absent all the same.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “They just go down the list and mark us all off. Feinberg, Greenberg, Goldman, Ginsberg. You have to jump around like crazy to make them see you’re there.”