Jericho (32 page)

Mr. Steenrod didn’t tell me his business secrets. Why should he? But even I could see that the financial side of things wasn’t going well. Still, I was nervous about what work would be like under the new owners. As it turned out, though, I didn’t have anything to worry about. The man who took over as boss (it’s always a man) was a nice middle-aged guy who told me the first day to call him Mike when there was nobody else around. He was a little bit rounded, with one of those middle-aged-male bellies and a jawline that was starting to go, but he was slightly pink and healthy-looking and he smiled all the time. He was nothing at all like the public’s idea of a funeral director, unlike dear Steenrod who fit the image to a T. The ideas the public has, they’re something I’d soon learn about. I’d learn about religion too: another subject I thought I’d never have to know, but I’m glad now that I was wrong.

Mr. Steenrod, a kind and generous person really, may have given me my start, but Mike became my mentor. He’s
the one who introduced me to what he calls “the culture,” which are the words he uses for the whole funeral-directing business and the people associated with it. He made me feel at ease right away. I think he appreciated my people skills. He freed me from working out of sight all the time, down in the prep room with my makeup supplies in big steel tool boxes and my blow-dryers, and let me be on the door too. Being on the door is one of the most important tasks around any funeral home. When people arrive at a viewing and there’s nobody on the door it creates the worst impression possible, which you can never erase. To be met by somebody who’s not properly dressed or doesn’t have the right kind of voice or doesn’t seem calm and caring enough is almost as bad. When he explained this to me, I started to feel proud when he asked me if I could be on the door Tuesday night.

The Chain was supposed to maintain the old owner’s place in the community, and it certainly did in this case. It even put money into redecorating the place top to bottom, making it a lot less gloomy. This was very expensive, as Mike explained to me, because of course all the work had to be done either very early in the morning or late at night and had to be absolutely invisible until it was finished and then still seem like the same place people were already familiar with, only brighter and more up to date. Wallpapering costs really a lot when it has to be done all at once. Mike told me the figures but I can’t remember them. Carpeting costs a fortune when it’s all replaced overnight, and painting when nobody’s supposed to smell anything different.

The Chain always said that it keeps all the funeral homes separate from each other and I guess they did, but Steenrod’s was twinned—that’s the term people used—with one out in
the suburbs, because both of these profit centres (those are the words I picked up) were in deep trouble. Steenrod’s is in such a bad part of the city, as you know, and its customers are dying off. I realize that sounds funny, but you understand what I mean: the neighbourhood is deteriorating more and more; it’s unstable. Out in Richmond, where everything is growing all the time, the business is carried on mostly in Chinese, and the Asian funeral homes are very competitive with each other; there are too many of them and it’s hard for any of them to make much profit. This is why the twins were unofficially put together in the way I described. Which is also why I was asked once or twice if I wanted to go out there to do little jobs, such as being on hand during a viewing when a non-Asian funeral was scheduled, or being a backup esthetician. Cosmetics are usually the embalmer’s territory, I soon found out. Steenrod’s had been an exception, because Mr. Steenrod thought he didn’t have the necessary skills himself and never had, and because there was a long tradition of using women who lived in the neighbourhood. That was before I came along and before the area changed so much. Working from time to time at the Wing-On in Richmond, where everybody was very nice to me, very considerate and polite if a bit formal sometimes, I had to learn about how makeup is different for Asian people. Mike wanted me to keep on being an esthetician as well, because that’s part of the tradition of the institution, he said. That’s also when I first began to find out about all the religious differences as well. Mike was very good about answering my questions.

“The culture is declining in B.C.,” he told me. I was startled. I mean, the population’s always going up and people
are always dying, so aren’t there more people dying? How can the culture be declining? I kept asking questions, which he always seemed happy to answer, and eventually I understood what I think he meant. He was telling me that the industry was tied up in a lot of tradition and had to change pretty fast or else (which is why the Chain seemed like a good thing, I guess). “A number of Asian cultures,” he said, “don’t have what you and I would recognize as a funeral service. There are observances, a rite, but not the kind of thing we’re used to offering the public. Then there’s the trend towards cremation. There’s still a role for funeral directors, of course, but it’s not as big a one as before.” Mike got a bit down sometimes, which didn’t seem to be part of his character at all, not as I saw it.

The Chain paid me more money than Mr. Steenrod could have ever afforded, which was just as well because my expenses went way up; now I had to dress like a serious woman and be well turned out all the time. The outfits they wanted me to wear were jackets and skirts either black or navy, with a white blouse and a silk scarf around the neck. I was never quite able to solve the shoe problem. For one thing, I hate dressy shoes—I’m not a dressy shoe kind of person—and couldn’t find anything I liked that would go with the suits, at least not any designed for people who work on their feet all the time. I totally hated the scarf, which I thought made me look like a flight attendant. But the company was firm. Their idea is that in a crowded room full of dressed-up people, visitors need to be able to pick out the members of the staff and that this was a kind of insignia that’s a lot less tacky than a badge that says
HELLO MY NAME IS…
But that scarf changed my life. It really did.

There was a lot of back and forth between Steenrod’s and the Wing-On. The two groups of people were getting more and more interchangeable all the time, and one day something came up that looked a little troublesome. There’d been a “situation of unnoticed death” and the remains were up at the coroner’s where an autopsy had been done. The family—they’re European, which is important for the story—was going there to make the identification, and Mike had to send somebody because this is, as you can imagine, a very traumatic experience for the next of kin; it would be for anybody. When that was over, and the family members had been comforted and had gone home, the transfer would be done in the transfer vehicle. The only person available to do the removal was a young Chinese fellow from Richmond whose English isn’t very good. So Mike didn’t want him dealing with the family. At the time I was angry, because I thought this showed anti-Asian prejudice in the company; but thinking about it now, in a calmer state of mind, I’m a whole lot less sure, for that doesn’t seem to me the way Mike is at all. Anyway, Mike was busy with business and I had to go along in the transfer vehicle and stand by to assist the family if they needed any help.

It’s not like the old movies where the relative goes into the cold room and an attendant pulls out one of the drawers and turns back the sheet so the person making the ID, standing right there, can get a close look. Nowadays what they do is have the remains ready beforehand, out of the drawer and on a gurney, and the family are in a waiting room in another part of the building, usually on some other floor, and get a look on closed-circuit TV. I guess they figure seeing their loved one on a screen makes it seem less real than if they did it in person.

I met with the sister. She was pretty distraught and told me that she’d had to take heavy-duty tranquilizers. She sure didn’t look well. I told her that I was going to go down and see that everything was ready. I’m glad I did, because it sure wasn’t. Someone who’s been autopsied is a horrible thing to see, especially that enormous Y-shaped scar that takes up the entire chest and also the incision all the way around the skull where the brain’s taken out and examined and weighed. The first one’s covered by a sheet of course and the other is often hidden by hair, especially in the case of a woman. But this time the people doing the autopsy screwed up. I don’t know what happened but there was a big flap of skin, like an awning almost, hanging down over the forehead and hiding the top part of the face. I called but nobody was around. So I used my finger to push it back in place. Only it wouldn’t stay put! The remains were all right otherwise: not bad at all for an unnoticed death. You’d be amazed at how fast those can turn really nasty. Finally I took off my scarf and tied the flap in place, arranging the material as best I could to make it look like something done as a courtesy, to brighten up the place or whatever. I didn’t know what I’d do if the woman’s sister asked me about it, I just hoped it wouldn’t show up too well on the monitor. Well, the way it worked out, everything was fine.

The next day I told Mike what happened, not to make myself the hero or anything but only telling it as one of those stories that are funny afterwards but not at the time. He said that I showed the kind of initiative he looks for in people who can go places in the company. He asked me if I wanted to become the FDA. I was so amazed that I didn’t know what to do or what to say. But of course I said yes. The
Funeral Director’s Assistant takes courses and so on but isn’t a licensed director. She can, however, do about everything except embalming (which frankly suits me fine, though I don’t think you could call me a squeamish person).

Once he gave me the promotion, Mike started taking even more time with me, talking to me in his office. One day he asked me if I wanted to go with him to the B.C. Funeral Directors’ Association dinner. “It’s a good opportunity for you to get deeper into the culture” is what he said. “Hear about how other people do things. You need to be industry-wide in your vision—look beyond this place, and me.” I decided yes even before he finished. He sort of hemmed and hawed, all embarrassed, making sure I had the right outfit to wear. He was so awkward at it, I was touched.

That night was a big eye-opener for me. There I was in a banquet room at the Bayshore with hundreds of funeral directors from all over the province, mostly men but not all of them and all of them stubborn about having a good time. This mostly involved drinking liquor, telling stories and talking shop. Because I was there as one of them—the idea made me feel good, though it was a little scary, too—I got to overhear stuff that they wouldn’t say with outsiders around. For instance, it seemed a lot of funeral directors are heavily into golfing. I found out they have a tournament every year that they call the Formaldehyde Open—but only among themselves of course. A lot of their talk seemed to be about money. “I hear that since
′88
they’re down to two hundred and twenty-five calls from almost eight hundred.” That kind of thing. Everybody was beautifully dressed.

I got sucked up in one group of men who were telling stories about the Old Days (I’m not sure when that was). One
man was telling what sounded like a tall tale to me, but you never know, about a husband who came in before the visitation to have some private moments with his late wife. “He stood looking for a couple of minutes, then he said to me, completely serious: ‘My Bunny had enormous boobs. What happened to her boobs?’” Everybody was laughing but they were also looking over at me nervously, because they thought I wouldn’t like them using that word or maybe even the idea. But I know how to behave and not make other people uncomfortable. I smiled. “He wanted me to go back inside after he was gone, which of course I had to do, calling him every word I could think of.” The others were all laughing out loud. One of them actually choked a little and had to take a big swallow of his drink. The end of the story is that the woman’s breasts were pumped up but gravity took its course and they began to flop to either side. The funeral director had to place cushions under her arms to raise them a bit and make a kind of barrier to keep everything reined in.

That was the evening Mike and I started dating. And just the other day I thought about it for another reason too. I was thinking about Bunny with the big breasts and how there wouldn’t have been a story to tell if she’d been a closed-casket service, which these days most of them are. Even after figuring in people from Italian and Portuguese communities and various Asian ones, less than a third of families have open caskets any more. If a person has been dead only a day and is being buried right then, as with a Jewish person who’s Orthodox or Conservative, there’s no embalming and usually no cosmetics either, and so you can understand why there’s a closed casket. Not that a non-Jewish firm would be called in such cases; I’m using this just to make a point, which is
that more and more people from other backgrounds want it that way too, not for any religious reason but to keep their distance from death. They don’t want to be reminded of it any more than they have to be.

I was doing the hair of this woman whose family certainly wanted it that way, doing the hair not just because the family members might wish to view the body, if only for a few seconds, before the casket is closed (we always make the offer), but also because an ethical funeral director will always put in the same amount of work whether anyone else will see it or not. So there I was alone down in the prep room with my apron on. I don’t know why, but I didn’t have the radio on the way I usually do (the classical music station, though I don’t know anything about classical music and never listen to it otherwise). I never feel completely alone when I’m down there, for you’re always aware that there’s another human being there with you, a real man or woman—and sometimes a child: that’s tough, let me tell you. She looked as though she must have been a nice person, someone you’d want to get to know, and so I started to talk to her, saying the sorts of things I’d say to somebody who’d come into the salon when I was young and had hardly ever been outside Alberta in my life. I wasn’t even aware I was doing it until I heard myself say something that made me stop. I was doing her hair, like I say, and I heard these words come out of my mouth: “Why can’t we talk to the living the same way you and I are doing now?” It creeped me right out.