A Little Bit Wicked (4 page)

“Grandma, do you think maybe they’re wrong about—I mean—in my heart, I just don’t think being gay is a sin.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But Jesus told us to love everybody without judging, so I try to do that.”

I never really knew how many friends she had until her funeral. Lots of ladies from lots of faiths, each bearing a gift of lemon bars, shoofly pie, or Tater Tots hotdish because Jesus told us to feed each
other, too. (The one delicacy not available on the Upper West Side: church-lady cuisine.)

Over the next year or so, I tried to pay extra attention to Grandpa, tried to call more often and visit whenever I could. Mark and I chipped in with our cousins Kim and Karla and hooked him up with a new plasma TV so he could watch
As the World Turns,
Red Skelton reruns, golf, and me on
Pushing Daisies
. When I called him, he was marvel-struck about it.

“I can’t believe there’s a flat TV now,” he said. But over the next several weeks, each time I spoke to him, there seemed to be a little less wind in his sails. Not long ago, he told me, “My bags are packed, Kristi. I miss my girl.”

“Grandpa…” I hated hearing him talk like that, so I said the worst possible thing in response: “Don’t say that.”

“I love you, Kristi.”

“I love you, too, Grandpa. And I’ll be down next month to visit, okay?”

“If I don’t see you, you know I love you.”

A few days later, as Aaron and I sat stranded on a plane on the tarmac in Mexico—our flight delayed, luggage lost, ticket bollixed, and him finally convinced that I really and truly am cursed with terrible travel karma—I coaxed a last glimmer of life from my BlackBerry and saw that Mark had tried several times to call me.

“Oh, no…”

I looked up at Aaron, trying to hold on to the feeling of the sun on my skin, the much needed rest and quiet conversation, laughing, being lovers. That little oasis of days with him had been so sweet, lifted out of our day-to-day hassles like a perfect star lifted from an expanse of rolled-out cookie dough.

“I have to call,” I said, and Aaron nodded.

He squeezed my hand while Mark gave me the news. I clicked off the phone and tried to breathe, but there was no air in this empty
closet of loss. Aaron pulled me into his arms as best he could with the whole armrest/drink-tray operation between us, and I wept ungracefully, bunching a wad of his shirt in my fist, trying hard to keep quiet, not because I cared what anyone thought but because fresh grief is so intensely private. He brushed his mouth across my temple, holding me without hushing or shushing or offering platitudes.

Aaron gives good comfort. He’s that sort. Leaning into his body, I experienced pure, oxygenated gratitude. Oh, what a gift to have someone hold you so dearly in a moment when you so dearly need to be held. But somehow the blessing of his being there made his coming absence cut all the deeper. I thought about Mark, voice husky, eyes red-rimmed at Grandma’s funeral. He wasn’t crying for himself or even for her; he was looking at Grandpa, wondering how a man goes on without his mate, his wife, the love of his life. If Mark didn’t love his own wife with such depth, perhaps he could have looked away.

That’s just not the way we do things here in the
Devil Wears Prada
generation. It’s a relationship stink bomb for a woman to admit that she wants to be married; it sounds old-fashioned at best and at worst, desperate. (Frankly, it would help matters if they’d allow gay marriage because anything gays do is automatically chic.) I don’t make judgments about what’s right or wrong for other people, but for me, the idea of living together without being married feels very
leave the gun, take the cannoli
. I don’t care if it sounds old-fashioned. Or desperate. Or desperately old-fashioned. I’m saying right now and for the record, I believe in marriage as a social institution, a business deal, and a holy sacrament. I’m not jaded about it because long before I witnessed the bitchy divorces of Beverly Hills, I watched the long, rich marriages of my parents, my grandparents, and Mark and Betsye, still high school sweethearts after all these years.

When I felt the nearness of this man I love, his strong hand on my back, his warm breath on my wet face, I wanted my husband to be holding me, and the thought of that never happening was far more
heartbreaking than the thought of my grandfather fixing to spend eternity in the arms of the wife who loved him. I didn’t want to suffocate or scare Mr. Writer, but I was suddenly certain I could no longer settle for—

“Peanuts?”

The turtle-lipped flight attendant stands over me. Mexico was yesterday. Now I’m on this airplane. In this time zone. Alone and on my way to Grandpa’s funeral and getting glared at by this broad who hates me because she hates short people or hates TV people or whatever it is up her butt. She proffers a sad little foil pouch.

“No, thanks,” I tell her quietly.

She walks away, and I retreat into my headphones until we land. Everyone is instantly on their feet, jostling and jockeying for position in the aisle, dragging elephants, anvils, and grand pianos down over my head. Craning to see through the forest of shoulders and elbows, I wave my hand to catch the attention of my missionary from first class, but she’s busy with whoever sat in my seat. I’m forced to enlist the help of vitriol-shaped-like-a-flight-attendant.

“Excuse me? Could you please help me locate my bag?”

“No,” she says flatly.

“If you could just tell me where—”

“It’s not my problem,” she snaps.

“Really? I mean…because…really?” I am genuinely baffled. Why would she choose this? Purely from the standpoint of character study, I wonder, how does a bouncing baby girl grow up so pissed off at the world? “You must be very unhappy in your job.”

“Well, that’s none of your business.”

I quietly ask her for her name.

“That’s none of your business either.”

She looks down on me from an upright and locked position. I can tell by the way she taps her foot that she knows all about me. How I cut her off on the freeway in my kazillion-dollar car and light gold-
leafed cigars with the tattered dreams of my upstairs maid. I’m acutely aware of the little girl behind me and how it would feel to her if she saw Miss Noodle go off all cranky pants on some flight attendant. But even Miss Noodle has her limits.

“Your name. Please.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to pray for you.”

“I don’t need your prayers.”

“Oh, honey,” I tell her truthfully, “we all need prayers. And I’m fixin’ to talk to God about you specifically.”

M
ark meets me at the airport. He and Betsye live in Denver now, the eternally patient parents of two vibrant teenagers. He was a late bloomer, but sometime during high school, he sprouted up over six feet. Gone is the Greg Brady shag, replaced by a
hoo rah
flattop. Though he usually wears Wranglers and a polo to work, he’s done out in a somber grief-appropriate suit today, tall, lanky, and handsome. We’re the first to arrive at Grandpa and Grandma’s church, First Baptist in Hinton (not to be confused with First Baptist in Broken Arrow, First Baptist in Noble, or First Baptist in New York City). I link my arm through his as we approach Grandpa’s open casket.

How can anyone who’s seen a dead body question the existence of the soul? The difference between the living and the dead so clearly goes beyond temperature and movement. There’s an energy that’s there.
Until it isn’t. Human beings—and let me just interject here that I love being part of a species whose name is a verb—human
beings
have an innate fascination with the idea of afterlife, a close cousin of our fascination with death. We’re forever trying to build bridges, find peepholes. It’s a major theme in theatre, music, literature, and art. Everything from Dante’s
Inferno
to—well, take
Pushing Daisies
for example.

What if (proposed the delightfully quirky mind of Bryan Fuller) a man could bring the dead back to life with a single touch. Interesting premise, but a bit of a free lunch unless you build in a few complications. Another touch and the resurrected one is dead again. And if that second touch doesn’t happen in sixty seconds or less, someone else dies. (Another human fixation: the bargain that is salvation. We need things to balance out. If you get a little this, you gotta give a little that.) Of course, capitalism kicks in, and the man decides to use this extraordinary gift to solve murders and collect the rewards. It’s a complicated scenario; the protagonist is playing an almost impossible daily game of Twister that has us holding our breath and hopefully being a little more mindful of life, death, and the power of touch.

It’s good TV (and, no, that is not an oxymoron) with excellent writing and an amazing ensemble of terrific actors. To see it strangled in its infancy by ratings or the writers’ strike would have broken my heart. I learned just how quickly circumstances can kill a worthy show when I did My Huge Hit Sitcom
Kristin
on NBC. (Huge hit. Puccini high-note huge. Ask either of the people who saw it.)

Obviously,
Pushing Daisies
is a great gig, but when it came up, I’d already made a semifirm commitment to do Mel Brooks’s
Young Frankenstein
on Broadway. The Madeline Khan role. And I worship Madeline Khan—even named my little dog Maddie in homage. That was hard to turn away from. And now that I think about it,
Frankenstein
is another piece concerning the bridge between life and death, another examination of what truly constitutes life. Electricity? Chemistry? Or is animation without a soul…monstrous?

As firmly as I believe in the existence of my left ankle, I believe in the existence of my soul. Einstein said energy can’t be created or destroyed, only changed. The Bible says God breathed life into Adam. Do the math. Standing beside my brother at the front of the church, I feel my grandfather in the room, but I know he’s not in this box.

Mark puts his arm around my shoulder, and we gaze at this man who was so important to us both. But after a moment, our sniffling gives way to frozen silence. We exchange furtive
Are you lookin’ at what I’m lookin’ at?
glances.

“What’s with his hand?” I whisper.

“I don’t know,” Mark whispers back. “Seems like it’s sort of…floating.”

And it is. The hands are positioned to cross over Grandpa’s abdomen, as you would expect, but the right hand is hovering stiffly a good three inches above the left.

“That’s freaky,” Mark says.

He reaches out and gingerly presses down on the back of Grandpa’s wrist. The entire arm toggles like a diving board. As soon as Mark takes his finger away, the thing springs back up. If anything, the gap is wider.

“Dang,” says my brother.

“Oh, my gosh, Mark, why is it doing that?”

“How do I know? You’re the one who’s fascinated with forensics. All I know is we can’t have this arm flailing all over when Dad gets here.” Mark hooks a finger inside his necktie, giving himself room to swallow. “Okay. I got it. Here we go.”

He gently takes Grandpa’s right hand and carefully shuffles it under the left, but when he lets go, both arms pop up, hands hovering over the fly of Grandpa’s Sunday pants.

“
Crap!
Mark. That’s not good.”

“Oh, ya think?” he hisses. “We need somebody from the funeral home.”

“Yes. Yes,” I agree enthusiastically, envisioning a man in black. He’ll know what to do. He’ll speak furtively into his cuff link.
We’ve got a floater, Eames. Get over here with a torque wrench and some glutaraldehyde.

An undignified giggle snorts from my sinuses.

“Kristi.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s not funny. I’m—I’m not laughing.”

“Me neither,” Mark says tightly.

The next moment, we both explode into hysterics, practically strangling each other in an effort to stop laughing. It is the most lowbrow, slapstick form of amusement. I’m ashamed to tell you about it. I won’t even try to spin it with some kind of “Oh, Grandpa would have loved that” horse crap because,
c’mon,
this is not what anyone envisions when they prepay thousands of dollars for that final fluff ’n’ fold. But for Mark and me, it’s such a relief. It’s like Truvy says in the play
Steel Magnolias:
“Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.” Laughter is life-giving. It makes you breathe.

We finally pull ourselves together, and I hug Mark hard. Mark reshuffles Grandpa’s hand so the one that wants to stay down stays down, and the one that doesn’t want to cooperate is hovering again. Mark tufts the handkerchief from his own breast pocket and arranges it to fill the gap between the two. Close enough for country, as the saying goes.

Folks begin to arrive. Scattered family. Many friends. Everyone says how nice Grandpa looks. And how nice it is that I’m going to sing. I wish I shared their confidence. As we file into the pews, sitting shoulder to shoulder, I’m not at all sure what sort of sound is going to come out when I open my mouth, but I’m afraid
nice
isn’t going to be the word for it. It’ll sound about as nice as a dead man looks, I guess.

Keep on keepin’ on,
I tell myself as we take our seats.
Keep on keepin’ on.

There’s a greeting and a prayer, a hymn, the usual things. Then my
cousin Karla gets up to read a poem she wrote for Grandpa’s retirement party, when he closed the doors of his barbershop after forty-five years of shaves and haircuts. Standing at the podium, she adjusts the goosenecked microphone and clears her throat.

“‘The Very Patient Barber.’” Her voice wavers only a little. “‘Every Tuesday through Saturday, one could find…A very patient barber, a one of a kind.’”

Grandpa and Grandma Chenoweth’s church is one of the first places I performed, when I was seven or eight years old. I marched up to the front, fully prepared to belt out my favorite Evie Tornquist song, “I’m Only Four Foot Eleven, but I’m Going to Heaven, and It Makes Me Feel Ten Feet Tall.” But I was still a long way from my full height of four feet eleven inches (as the song prophesied), so when I got up to the podium, I disappeared completely behind it. I peeked around, stepped to the side, got a big laugh, and proceeded to blow the doors off the place. Evie would have been proud. Grandpa practically burst his buttons.

But singing was not my first grand passion. When I was four, I saw a ballet on PBS and told my mom, “I want to do that.” It seemed like an odd but basically healthy pastime, so Mom inquired around and came up with the Runyon School of Ballet, which wasn’t far from our house. I vaguely remember my first recital. I was a tulip. I had to pee. One of the other tulips did pee. I immediately realized that this was not a good choice. (Moral of that story: far less embarrassing to learn from the mistakes of others. Feel free to apply this in your own life as needed.)

By the time I was in second grade, I was eating, sleeping, and breathing ballet. I adored my ballet teacher, Miss Jane. She was as strict as a wooden yardstick, with posture to match. She took ballet very, very seriously, and so did I. Not all the girls did. A lot of girls skipped class occasionally, traded Skittles in the corner, complained about the heat, while my friend Sally and I hung on Miss Jane’s every
word. In addition to the technical steps and forms of dance, she talked about giving oneself to the emotion of the music to create a character. Miss Jane encouraged me to audition for the Tulsa Ballet production of
The Nutcracker,
and I did, but I was fully prepared to be told I was too little. “Too little” was something I heard a lot. I didn’t want to be taller just for the sake of being the same as everyone else, I was just tired of looking at butts all the time. Sometimes it seemed as if life in general had a
MUST BE THIS TALL TO RIDE
sign posted, and I never quite measured up. I was thrilled to flinders when Mom showed me the cast letter listing my name in the “Bunnies” column.

During one performance, I saw a bit of greenery—a piece of garland or something from the set dressing—lying in the middle of the floor just before the company dancers were to make their entrance. All Miss Jane’s warnings about stray bobby pins and ribbons on the classroom floor sprang into my mind. Think “Someone could put an eye out!” only with broken ankles and subluxated joints. I knew I had to save them. But wait! I couldn’t break character.
What would a bunny do?
I thought. And not just any bunny. A Tchaikovsky bunny. A Victorian Tchaikovsky bunny. On Christmas Eve. With Stanislavsky devotion to my role, I hopped across the stage, took the stray greenery in my mouth, deposited it safely off to the side, and hopped back to my place. After the show, our director, Moscelyne Larkin—an Oklahoma dance legend and veteran of the original Ballets Russes—came backstage and called out over the noise and postshow bustle, “Where’s my clever bunny?”

Fearing she wouldn’t see me in the forest of long legs, I jumped and waved.

“Me! It was me!”

“Ah! Brava!” she said, and I felt six inches taller than however tall you have to be to ride.

As I got older, I worked hard to perfect my ballerina form and my ballerina body. I focused a lot of attention on my turnout, careful to
do everything from riding my bike to climbing the stairs in a way that encouraged the long, lean muscles of a dancer, instead of the tough stems of an athlete. I watched
Great Performances
on PBS anytime they featured dance and read everything I could find about the great ballerinas, including Maria Tallchief, who was not only an Oklahoman, but also part Native American, just like me. Paging through those books, looking at the pictures of stages, lights, and roses, I felt sad for Miss Jane. I thought,
She didn’t make it
. And I wondered if maybe that was why she tried so hard to get us girls to take it seriously. Of course, it’s possible that she was doing exactly what she wanted to do and it was teaching she took seriously. Either way, I soaked up every ounce, striving to rise to her level of self-discipline.

Dancing was work. Singing came naturally.

Church was a big part of my life, and singing was a big part of church. Mark and I were both in youth choir, and I lived for it, but one evening, riding home with a friend, I saw Mark hanging out at the 7-Eleven. He’d played hooky from
choir
. Sacrilege! But Mom was surprisingly cool about it.

“Music isn’t his gift,” she shrugged.

And it really isn’t. Mark should not be allowed to sing. Ever. Mom quickly recognized this and let him off the choir hook, supporting his unique talents the same way she supported mine. He was a brain, which made my school life about as much fun as his choir life. Every year on the first day of class, teachers would sing the familiar strain: “Oh, you’re Mark Chenoweth’s little sister!” They always leaped to the conclusion that algebra was in my blood. Disillusionment invariably followed. Mark was a whiz with numbers, who couldn’t understand my mathematical tone deafness. Pressed into service as my tutor, he’d laboriously explain the integer over the squared root of blah blah blah, and I tried, truly, I did, but it always ended in frustration.

“Aaugh, Kris! How can you not get it? I told you ten times. Mom?”

Mom would rotate in, make a valiant attempt, eventually calling, “Jerry? Help?”

Then Dad would come in, calm everyone down, and basically do my homework for me.

Poor Mom had to wait for the sports gene to skip a generation; both Mark’s kids are athletic. (Heck, my dog, Maddie, is athletic compared to me and my brother.) When bookish Mark and artsy me were little, Mom was still playing tennis, and she was
good
. She competed in a nonpro championship the year I was in third grade. I was invited to a roller-skating party that day. One of the events was a race, and as the only girl who stepped up to participate, I was determined to beat those boys. Unfortunately, halfway through the event, I fell and broke my arm just below the elbow.

“It was the darnedest thing,” the party mom told my mom, who arrived breathless and still in her little white tennis dress. “She just got up and kept going. Came in second.”

I asked Mom later if she was mad about having to leave the tournament when she was doing so well.

“Of course not!” she said, looking at me as if I’d suggested she might pull the oven out of the wall and reinstall it upside down. “That’s not how it is when you love someone, Kristi.”

One of the first solos I sang at our church was “Jesus, I Heard You Had a Big House”—a Bill and Gloria Gaither song about the completely welcoming warmth of Heaven.
Jesus, I heard you had a big house where I could have a room of my own. And, Jesus, I heard you had a big yard, big enough to let a kid roam.
And if I do say so myself, I sang the livin’ you-know-what outta that song. Someone at a church in Tulsa heard about it and asked if I’d like to come and sing it for them, and naturally I liked that a lot. Another church across town asked me to come, and then another and another, and pretty soon churches across the state were asking me to sing, and it eventually became sort of a family hobby. Dad bought a little sound system for me because some
times we’d arrive and the church’s system was lacking, and he saw how much it bothered me if I couldn’t do well. Evie, Sandi Patty, and Amy Grant were quite popular then; the so-called Christian contemporary genre had made it onto the radio and was gaining some serious mass audience. Of course, we didn’t know anything about demographics. We just thought it was great that folks invited us over, and they thought it was great that here was this little girl with a big voice.