Putting Makeup on Dead People (4 page)

B holds out his arm and checks his sleeve. “Red. My red shirt.”

“Everyone cut it out, or we’re gong to be late,” Mom says. “And no one’s borrowing my lipstick. You can all get your own makeup.” As she heads out the door, she adds, “But Linnie, you will borrow a hat, and we will discuss your hair later.”

At St. Camillus, we make our way down the sidewalk to the church—Mom and B first, me in the back, and Linnie marching angrily in the middle in black boots, black pants, black leather jacket, and Mom’s impulse-purchase lime green beret, full of seaweed hair.

Father Dean Martin, the pastor of St. Camillus, greets us at the door. Father Bill, his assistant, usually does the Sunday afternoon Mass and also directs the Players’ productions. Father Dean Martin, however, provides his own variety of entertainment. Father Dean Martin, who likes people to call him by all three names because he gets such a kick out of being called Dean Martin. After Dad died, I think Father Dean thought he was taking me under his wing by offering me the job of stuffing the parish bulletins every week. I still help sometimes in the parish basement office, which smells a lot like a hardware store and has these humming fluorescent lights that give me a headache. But luckily, there are some other kids helping these days, so I only get called in every few months.

Still, I got to spend a lot of time in the rectory observing Father Dean. He of the pale skin and the white-blond hair, who likes to belt “Volare” off-key into his letter opener. He with a complete lack of anything Mediterranean in his genetic code, but who likes to ask me at every chance where my family is from in Italy. “Calabria,” I always tell him.

“Ah, the boot,” he always says. And I never know how to respond to that other than a pensive and vaguely meaningful nod. I wonder if Father Dean became a priest because that’s the closest he could get to being an Italian guy.

Now I smile and shake his hand.

Mom says, “How are you, Father Dean?”

“How are any of us, Martha?” Dean Martin has a philosophical bent, and when he bends that way, simple conversations suddenly extend in complexity. And duration.

“Hmm,” Mom says, which is as good an answer as I can think of to that.

“Well, Parisi family, I just thought you should know, I’m going out for Italian with Father Bill tonight, and I’m hoping for the biggest bowl of pasta I can take in.” He pats his belly, and I notice he’s wearing a very large pizza watch. The minute hand ticks past a piece of pepperoni. “Rigatoni, macaroni, seashells, you name it.” He smiles and asks, “Donna, what’s your favorite kind of pasta?”

“Gnocchi, I guess.”

Father Dean nods and sighs.

“Okay, Father,” Mom says, “I think we’re going to go find our seats now.”

“Good idea,” he says. “Say one for me.”

As we walk away, Linnie mumbles, “Oh my God, he is such a nutter.”

“But he’s still a priest,” Mom hisses. “Have some respect.”

“Okay, Father Nutter.”

We all laugh, even Mom, who tries to pretend it’s not funny. “He’s just a little different.” She suppresses a snicker.

Once Mass starts, though, Mom’s all business. Linnie gets pouty, and B gets easily distracted, looking around for and smiling at all the people he knows. I can’t help but think of Dad in church, so Linnie’s reaction makes sense to me, but B, I don’t get. Sometimes I want to remind him that our Dad is dead, that living without him is hard, that he shouldn’t ever forget what we lost. I couldn’t if I tried, so at church I just give in to the inevitable and go to my quiet place inside.

I wish I could just sit there still for an hour and not get up and down and kneel and stand and sit again, but I tried that once, and Mom wasn’t such a fan of that choice. My favorite time is during Communion, after I get it and go back to my seat and close my eyes. I think about Dad, or about nothing at all. Today, I think about what Mr. Brighton said, and I say a little prayer that I am able to love the whole person and be a good mortician. I’m not sure God answers prayers like that, but I’m giving it a shot.

For a long time, I’ve thought God is supposed to look actually a little like Mr. Brighton, but with a big long beard and some sort of God toga. But I didn’t always. Once, when I was in first grade, Mom and Dad took us to the Newport Aquarium in Kentucky, and I pointed to a sea turtle as big as me, swimming right above us. “She looks like God,” I said.

“God isn’t a she,” Mom said.

“What about women’s rights?” Dad asked. “Or turtles’ rights, for that matter.”

“They can still vote—or swim—but God is our father, last I checked.”

Dad put a hand on my shoulder. “Well, Donna, when you find your sea turtle religion, I guess you can convert.”

Since then, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a group that worships a sea turtle and maybe holds services in the water or something, but I don’t think it exists.

After Mass, B stops to talk with one of his high school friends and says he’ll catch up with Mom at the car, and Linnie says she has to use the ladies’ room and pushes down the side aisle. I know she just wants to escape walking down the main aisle like Mom likes to do and which always seems to take forever. I’d also like to escape, but I don’t want to leave Mom alone.

When we finally reach the end of the aisle, Mary the usher lady hands Mom a bulletin. “So, Martha,” she says, elbowing Mom lightly and leaning close to her, “are you seeing anyone?” She asks this like she’s some kind of secret agent. “Singles Night Bingo next Saturday. We’re having bean casserole. And the Berger brothers will be there.”

“My husband died.” Mom uses the clipped tone that means she’s done talking.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Mary clearly does not recognize this tone. She crinkles her eyebrows, which, by Patty’s standards, are well beyond needing a good waxing. “I thought—when did that happen?”

“Three and half years ago,” Mom says.

“Oh, Martha.” Mary smiles brightly, playfully, winks at Mom. “There are more fish in the sea.”

“No,” Mom says firmly, not smiling. “Just one for me. He was my only one.”

“Well.” Mary clears her throat, looks away from Mom. She finds me. “So Donna, how about you? Do you have a boyfriend?”

I shake my head no.

Mary clears her throat again, a high-pitched clear—“Okay, ladies, you have a good night. Break a leg in the play, Donna.”

“You too,” Mom says to Mary with a saccharine smile.

Mary purses her lips, perplexed. “But I’m not in the play.”

“I know.” Mom winks and steers us away from Mary.

We walk through the parking lot, past the headless statue of Saint Camillus standing on what looks like a pair of big marble dice. Father Bill likes to say that he lost his head in a bet, but it was really the hailstorm last October. Mom shakes her head. “The nerve.”

I want an
only one
, I think. I also think, I don’t want him to die.

I wait with Mom until B and Linnie make their way to the car. Then Mom and Linnie and B go to meet Uncle Lou and Aunt Irene for dinner, and I head over to the school gym to get ready with the rest of the St. Camillus de Lellis Players, hoping they can distract me from being sad and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

When I was eight, I fell in love with the Players’ nonmusical production of
Auntie Mame
, in which Father Bill became a last-minute understudy for the title character. After Dad died, I didn’t know what to do with all the hurt, how to feel as much as I felt. Somewhere along the way, I realized I could feel anything I wanted on a stage. None of the activities at Woodmont had ever appealed to me. I couldn’t see the point. But this was different.

So when I was sixteen, after seeing a rousing production of
The Curious Savage
, I scheduled my audition. Since then, I’ve starred in such gems as
Flowers for Algernon
and the one Father Bill wrote himself,
A Flock of Priests,
which Father Bill called “theater of the absurd,” and involved inappropriately snug spandex.

Tonight’s performance is another Father Bill original called
A Very Paschal Mystery
, in which a series of Lenten bank robberies get solved, and the bank robbers themselves get unmasked and converted by an innocent bystander priest. I am the hapless bank teller who nearly gets shot, save for the sudden sincere prayer of Father Will, portrayed by Richie, who, at twenty-eight, is the only Player even close to my age. I think the play is hilarious, although Father Bill has promoted it as a dramatic thriller.

When I walk into the gym, Richie is pacing beneath a basketball hoop, pulling at the edges of his curly blond clown-wig hair. “Inner monologue,” he whispers. I nod.

Father Bill, Dr. Roger, and Leaf are setting up the folding chairs in front of the stage. I think Father Bill is maybe pushing forty-five, but he has that Dick Clark thing going on, so he may actually be ninety-seven or something. He claims tai chi and raw-egg smoothies keep him young.

“Where’s Linda with those sandwiches? I need some fuel.” Dr. Roger rubs his belly, bunching up his fifty is nifty T-shirt. He adjusts the brim of his fedora, which he wears even when doing checkups and fillings at his dental office. Richie swears that once, when a patient asked him to take it off, he wouldn’t give her any Novocain.

“Don’t worry. She’ll be here.” Leaf flips back one of her two long mousy braids. Leaf, like Dr. Roger, is a nifty fifty, and this is her first Players show. Last fall, her husband left her after thirty years of marriage. Last fall also marks when she moved to Dayton, started tie-dyeing most of her clothes, and changed her name to Leaf because she “turned over a new one.” Leaf e-mails the other Players “Cutest Puppies” slide shows accompanied by quotes with dubious attribution to the Dalai Lama. Leaf makes me nervous.

Perched on a chair downstage right is ninety-two-year-old Keenie, a tiny wrinkly fairy princess with short silver hair and a pixie nose. She waves. “Hiya, sweet thing.”

I wave back.

“Thank Jesus God,” Dr. Roger says, and I turn to see seventy-two-year-old Linda sauntering into the gym with a bag from Milano’s. Linda owns heels in eight different shades of red—tonight’s are fuchsia—and always smells vaguely of liquor and brisket.

Linda’s blond hair, a hue she’s told me is Sunflower Cascade, looks like hay. Her red lipstick is cracked, as usual, and her false teeth are perfectly aligned. She sets the Milano’s bag down on the stage, and Dr. Roger leaves Leaf and Father Bill to finish the chairs. “I’m ready for my Italian special,” Dr. Roger says.

“I’ll just bet you are,” Linda says, and laughs her hacking laugh.

“Please,” Keenie says. “I’d like to keep my appetite.”

True to form, the Players almost help me forget to miss Dad, almost forget that someone has to figure out how to tell Mom I’m applying to mortuary school. I got my acceptance letter to UD a month ago, and Mom seemed thrilled to pieces that I was following in my brother’s footsteps, that I’d be close to home, that UD is a Catholic school. I know she’s not going to be happy about this new choice, and the dread of telling her already circles like a shark in my stomach. Unfortunately, how to do this is a mystery even Father Will can’t solve for me. I’m going to have to do it myself.

By seven thirty, we’re all ready to go, standing in a circle, holding hands, and praying to Saint Genesius and Saint Cecilia, respectively in charge of acting and singing. Father Bill beams at us. “You all break a leg. Especially you, Father Will.”

Richie sets his lips in a serious line. “I will do my very best.”

“We know you will, honey,” Linda says, although I think she secretly likes being one of the bank robbers and shoving Richie to the ground at the end of Act One.

At exactly eight o’clock, the curtain goes up, and we’re off. As I open the bank for the day, looking out the imaginary front window downstage, I find my family in the second row—Uncle Lou, Aunt Irene, Mom, B, and Linnie, who has removed the beret. And next to Linnie is Liz. She’s wearing a high-collared, short-sleeved shirt that looks silky and exotic, even from a distance. Her hair is swirled up elegantly on top of her head, held in place by what looks like two sticks, and she still manages to look cooler than anyone in her vicinity. I can’t believe she came, and I do my best to not think about it too much. It’s stressful enough that my family is here.

During the robbery, Dr. Roger, wearing a ski mask and, of course, his fedora, yells, “Don’t make any funny moves, and we’ll all get through this.” His shouting smells like his sandwich, passionate with ham and onion. And he gets so into the yelling that through the tiny mouth hole in his ski mask, a spray of spit arcs up and lands in my eye. Dr. Roger’s oniony saliva actually stings and makes my eyes water, which makes it seem like I’m so scared, I’m crying.

Offstage, after the scene, Richie says, “Oh my God, that was
so
realistic.”

I almost tell him what really happened, but instead I shrug, and he whispers a quick and meaningful, “Bravo, bravo.”

Keenie, as usual, is the best one of us all, stealing the last scene from Richie as she chides the bank robbers to go back to church and treat their mothers nicely.

After the show, my family clusters together near their seats, except for B, who of course found a brand-new friend in the audience to chat with. And Liz and Mom are also talking again like old friends. Uncle Lou scans the gym and keeps yanking at the lapels of his red-checkered suit jacket. He looks more like Dad than ever. Uncle Lou once told me that people used to ask if he and Dad were twins, growing up. “No way,” Uncle Lou would say, offended. “I’m older than that little shit.” While Dad was still alive, Uncle Lou called him his little brother. Or “that little shit.”

Aunt Irene stands about six inches taller than Uncle Lou, and always wears her salt-and-pepper hair in a bun. She looks a little like someone’s parole officer, which I guess is how I might look if I were married to Uncle Lou. Now Aunt Irene sees me walking toward them, and waves. “Nice job, honey!”

Uncle Lou shakes his head. “Well, that was a real piece of work.” Aunt Irene slaps his arm with her program, and Uncle Lou adds, “Oh, and happy birthday, kid.”