Talk Before Sleep (26 page)

I
have lunch with Helen, and she tells me about the time she and Ruth had to dissect a fetal pig together in biology class. “We got in trouble that day because the teacher heard us talking about butt-fucking. We couldn’t help it. We’d just heard about it, and we couldn’t believe it. We had to talk about it. But then we got kicked out of class and Ruth was really pissed because she’d wanted to cut the pig’s heart out that day and send it to her boyfriend, Chuckie Lokenwitz.”

“What’d she want to do that for?”

Helen shrugs. “It was Valentine’s Day.”

We laugh, and for a moment it’s like when we were all at her house. But then it is just the two of us again, without her, and it’s different. I am reminded of public television specials that demonstrate the importance of everything needing to be on the right spot on the right chain, or things turn out to be something else, something wrong.

J
oe and I are going out to dinner so I am making Meg Kraft macaroni and cheese even though I worry about the yellow dye. He called from work a while ago, suggested I try to get a last-minute sitter, that he’d call back in a few minutes to see if I could. If so, he’ll go to the restaurant right from work, meet me there. When the phone rings, I pick it up and say, “Good news!”

“… Hello?” I hear a voice say.

“Andrew?”

“Yes.”

He never calls me. I know why he’s calling now. I start crying and some part of me held in permanent abeyance says, well, would you look at that. Look how fast those tears come. As if they’re always on the ready. Which of course they are.

“What time?” I ask Andrew.

He sighs. “Three thirty-seven this morning.”

“Thank you,” I say, and hang up. Then I pick up the receiver again, get halfway through dialing before I realize who I am calling: Ruth, to tell her she died.

I tear a piece of paper from the newspaper lying on the kitchen table, write down the date and 3:37
A.M.,
put it in my apron pocket. Then I push a dishtowel up to my mouth. The sounds I make remind me of those I heard coming from myself when I was in labor.

Meggie comes down from her room, silently crosses the kitchen and puts her arms around me. I spread my hand flat and hard against her back to feel the movement of air into, then out of her; then back into her again. I subtract nine years from forty-four.

T
hat night, at my request, Joe takes Meggie to a movie. I walk around the house, touching things: a book, the smooth surface of the kitchen counter, Meggie’s bear that smells like her. Then I get into the bathtub, he back with a wet washrag over my face, and let go. It is a howling, really, a self-indulgent letting go of some part of my awful pain. And then, I sense her presence. I sit up, pull the washrag off my face, frightened and exhilarated. She will appear, see-through, say something so wise and healing I can easily go on. But she does not appear. I only hear her voice inside my head. “Knock it off,” she says. And I do.

M
eggie wants to come to the funeral and she wants to wear black. She has a black skirt and black leotards and a black sweatshirt and that is what she wears, though with her school’s name turned to the inside. She sits in a church pew beside Joe. Two rows behind them I see Joel Fratto, his hands folded in his lap. His face is remarkably impassive; only his hands speak.

I sit in the front row with Helen, L.D., and Sarah. Sarah wears a beautiful green dress, Helen a forties special that Ruth loved: a brown print dress with huge buttons, a matching veiled hat. I wear a red miniskirt, which is what she told me to do. L.D. is wearing a black, ill-fitting suit belonging to her mother, who apparently is just about the same impressive size. She is wearing nylons that smash the hairs on her legs into a pattern you might find on a sofa, and she has on low black patent-leather heels. Heels! We don’t any of us know what to say and anyway, L.D.’s face told us not to try. We all read something we’ve written about Ruth, and though I have an awareness of people standing and saying things, myself included, I don’t know what they are. I can’t stop crying and finally I stop trying to. Tears seem beside the point, something like my hair color. I can’t retain what anyone is saying to me, but everyone keeps talking. I feel as though I’m in a field of bees.

A
fter the church service, the four of us drive in Sarah’s car to the nearby cemetery. There they are, the same two trees Ruth showed Michael and me, the stream that now you can hear running. Helen pulls me aside, wipes at my face. “Stop crying,” she says tenderly, and then starts herself.

“I wish she’d have let us see her,” Helen says.

“I know.”

“I guess she thought we shouldn’t see her looking so bad.”

“Do you think that was Ruth who decided that?” I ask. “Or Andrew? Doesn’t seem like Ruth. Seems like if it was Ruth worrying about looking bad, she’d have the funeral guy put a mask on her.”

“I know. Nixon or something.”

“Maybe we should ask Andrew to let us see her before they lower it in.”

“L.D. already asked. He told her no.”

“Really!” I say, with some admiration.

Someone turns around to hush us up, there is a little speech being given by the minister. And then people begin walking away. Wait, I think. Is this it? Is this all? I’m not ready to leave her. I see Joe and Meggie put flowers on the casket and walk away. There are so many flowers. She would have loved it. Eventually, I am the only one left. But then I hear the sounds of someone quietly weeping. I walk around to the other side of the casket and see L.D. sitting on the ground, her face
shoved into her hands, her legs splayed out before her. “L.D.?” I say softly.

She looks up. “I never even told her my name. I wanted her to keep on wanting to know, to have some questions that needed answering, so she’d stay alive.” She is not wearing a coat, and she starts shivering violently. ‘As if that would keep her alive! I never told her what my name is, and she really wanted to know.”

“Well … What is it?” I ask. “Tell me.”

She looks up at me with her huge, tortured face. “It’s Lolly fucking Dawn,” she says. “Okay?”

“Yes,” I say. “Okay.” I squat down, put my arms around her. She is so cold. Her hands, holding on to each other, are reddened and chapped already. “We have to go, L.D.,” I say. “She’s not here.”

I
like to think that she looked out the window one last time the night she died, and saw with a new understanding the placement of the stars. I like to think something incomprehensibly vast and complex moved into her soul at that moment, and that it, not pathology, was what took her breath away.

I
go bowling with L.D. and Sarah and Helen every other Wednesday night. We had shirts made up: Big Balls Bowling League on the back, our names in script over our pockets in the front. Once we got kicked out for L.D. starting a fight with the people who were bowling next to us and took exception to the fact that my gutter balls were crossing over into their lane. The other times, it’s just normal fun: beer, potato chips, good talking, a lot of hard laughter. Sometimes my stomach hurts the next day from it.