Reunion: A Novel (8 page)

T
here’s been some sort of confusion at the funeral home. Sasha was under the impression that Stan would be ready today, this morning, this moment. She and Nell are over in the corner now—Sasha gesticulating somewhat manically and Nell rubbing her shoulders periodically. I keep hearing, “It’s okay. Really, it’s okay.” Elliot is out in the hallway with one of the directors. Elliot, I can tell from his mannerisms, is charading as a good old boy. Lots of “womenfolk”-type comments and “They’ll be fine.” But he’s also getting the job done. He’s figuring out when Stan
will
be ready for us to see—dressed, poised, restructured in the noggin. It seems as if everybody is at least on the same page that if we’re going to do this open casket thing, we should preview the body and make sure it’s decent enough for the children. Make sure whatever is going to show up in that box doesn’t cause serious scarring.

It’s now my job to go through the box of clothes Sasha dropped off earlier. I’m meant to pick the right shirt and pair of pants, something the funeral director could have done, but since we’re here now, it falls to me. How I’m the one who ended up with this chore beats me, but between dealing with the good old boys, dealing with Sasha, and sorting through my dead father’s fashions, I guess I’d choose the latter.

These clothes are the clothes of an octogenarian. There’s a pair of stonewashed jeans in here with, no fooling, pleats. My father was a good-looking man. He was taller than me, even, and a little bit Alan Alda–looking. He never carried weight and he always dressed to accentuate his height. But these clothes. These clothes belong more to Alan Arkin than to Alan Alda. There’s even a pair of white orthopedic sneakers at the bottom that makes me wonder if he didn’t recently suffer some sort of crippling fall.

I pick out the only pants that aren’t pleated—khakis—and a long-sleeve button-down, white. This seems as good and inoffensive an outfit as any other to spend the next hundred years in. And if anybody has a problem with it, they can go through the box and pick something different. I really don’t care.

Too many years of doing a man’s laundry—who knows?—but I stick my hand down the back pockets of the khakis. Empty. But in the right front pocket there’s a five-dollar bill. I look up. Sasha is still mewling in the corner and Nell is still comforting her.

I hadn’t been looking for money. I hadn’t been looking for anything. But now here’s a five-dollar bill—a five-dollar bill that once belonged to my father. Nobody’s watching me and so I take the money and shove it into my own right-hand pocket and discover, of course, the fiver left over from last night. A meaningless coincidence. Do not assign significance where there isn’t any.

I slip out of the room with my sartorial decisions and walk past the little snack room where the coffee is made to what I believe is the main office. I knock, but no one answers. At the far end of the hall, Elliot is laughing at something the director has said. Or he’s faux laughing. I twist the handle of the door in front of me and open it slightly.

A blast of cold air hits me. I open the door farther and realize too late where I am. I could close the door and turn around, but it wouldn’t make a difference. I’ve already seen what this place is and what’s on the tall silver table in front of me. I don’t know the name for this room, but it’s the place where they’re keeping my father, because there he is, ten feet away from me. I feel light-headed. Thankfully he’s covered—head to foot—but there’s no doubt it’s him. They can’t get too many near-seven-footers. I’m tempted to step in, to pull back the sheet, to see exactly how much of my father’s face they’re going to be working with over the next forty-eight hours—how much they’ll need to add, how much has already been taken away—but a hand on my lower back stops me.

“Easy there.” It’s the second funeral director. He’s somehow gotten his other hand under my elbow. “I’m sorry you saw that,” he says, pulling me back. “Looks like you were about to fall over.”

He guides me away from the room and shuts the door, all in a single fluid movement.

“Are these the clothes you’ve chosen?”

I look down at my hands, at the pair of pants and the simple white shirt. I’d forgotten they were there. I nod.

“Let’s get these to Vicky. She’ll get them ironed and starched.”

I hand the clothes over.

“No tie?” he says.

I shake my head. “He didn’t like ties,” I say, which isn’t exactly true, because in his bedroom closet last night I found a laundry basket filled with bow ties. He must have liked them, or at least liked collecting them, but I’d never seen him actually wear a tie.

“Keeping it simple,” he says. “Remembering the man as he was, keeping him comfortable. I like that.”

“Thanks,” I say.

He is walking me back toward the room where my sister is probably still comforting Sasha. All these rooms have names, I’m sure—grieving room, snack room, deal room, reception room, private grieving room, argumentation room, mediation room, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe one’s the money room.

“I knew one family,” says the man, “who buried their beloved in his favorite pajamas and a rabbit-fur hunting cap.”

“Really?”

“And a pair of wool socks,” he says. “He hated to be cold.”

“That seems disrespectful.”

The man shrugs. We are outside the d
isappoint
ed-c
ustom
ers room. My brain feels flimsy. Sasha looks under control where they’ve finally got her seated at the table. Nell and Elliot are on either side of her looking through some sort of large catalog.

“Different strokes,” says the man. “I’ll leave you with your people.”

Your people. Beloved.
The South and its terminology.

Sasha looks up at me. “You didn’t pick the jeans, did you? I didn’t really mean to put them in there.”

“No,” I say. “Did he ever wear those?”

“He came home in them one day,” she says. “He liked how roomy they were.”

“I picked a pair of khakis.”

“Good,” she says. “Thanks.” She gives me this small, sad smile, and I think, in another life, I wouldn’t have hated her necessarily. In another life, if I’d run into her at a coffee shop or a party, I might not even have minded talking to her for a few minutes.

“What are you guys looking at?” I say. I don’t make a move to join them at the table.

“Urns,” says Elliot, turning the page in front of him.

“I thought we were burying him.”

“He wanted to be cremated,” says Nell. “After the viewing, they’ll—you know. So we’re just looking for something that isn’t hideous.”

“Is that expensive?” I say.

“Is what expensive?” says Elliot, still not looking up.

“All of it,” I say. “If we’re not burying him in the coffin, are we still buying it? Is that what’s done?”

Sasha still has her eyes on me, which I find more than a little disconcerting. “Don’t worry about the money,” she says.

Elliot flips a few more pages. “We’ll help out,” he says. “Kate and Nell and I—we’ll help with the costs.”

This is news to me. This is absolutely news to me. But here’s the thing: Does it piss me off because I can’t afford to chip in, or because it demonstrates Elliot’s blithe (and therefore enviable) relationship with money?

“No,” says Sasha. “I mean, don’t worry about it because it’s covered. We planned.”

This gets Elliot’s attention. Not money. But this. Must be nice.

“You
planned
?” he says. “That doesn’t sound like Dad.”

“When Mindy was born,” she says, her eyes still on me. “He insisted. It was his idea. He didn’t want to be a burden.”

A novel idea.

“Kate,” says Sasha. “What do you think?”

About the fact that my father turned sixty and became a completely different person? The fact that he woke up one day and decided that he no longer wanted to be a burden? The fact that he shot himself and somehow failed to consider the potential
emotional
burden?

“What are you talking about?” I say.

“The urn,” she says.

Oh, right: the urn.
Of course.

“I trust you guys,” I say.

“I think we should keep it really simple. Just a wooden box,” says Sasha.

“Do they even have that option?” says Nell, still browsing the photographs with Elliot. Their interest in the catalog is gross. Like they’re looking for some answer to the human condition in its glossy pages.

“People are odd,” says Elliot. “Look at this one.”

Nell laughs. “That’s so garish.”

Someone should point out to them that they’re acting like—what’s the word?—children. But for some reason I don’t think that person should be me. If only the funeral director would tell them how to behave—tell us
all
how to behave—we could go about our day and get on with our lives already.

“Elliot,” says Nell, her voice high and excited. She taps a picture in front of her.

“I know,” he says. “Jesus.”

There’s a quiet hysteria lingering on the other side of Sasha’s eyeballs. Ten to one, she’s medicated in some way, slightly sedated with one or two pink or yellow pills. “They can divide the ashes,” she says. “They can do a few tiny boxes if you want.” She says this still to me, like I’m the only one in the room worth talking to. (There’s an idea.) For some reason she’s latched onto me, as if having finally found eye contact, she is afraid to let it go.

I shake my head. “One box,” I say. “Wooden sounds nice.” The idea of lots of miniature boxes, handed out to all his ex-wives and children, is a little too surreal. It’s one thing that we’re doing this open casket, it’s something else entirely to hand out ashes like they’re party favors.

Elliot snaps the catalog closed and stands up. Sasha jumps a little and I think,
Yes, definitely medicated.

“Let’s blow this joint,” he says, which seems almost as vulgar as burying some guy in a hunting cap. Rabbit fur or no rabbit fur.

Nell stands and puts a hand on Sasha’s shoulder. Finally I am released from the zombie’s stare.

“Is there still barbecue around the corner?” says Elliot. “I’m starved.”

Maybe, just maybe, I can get my hands on some of Sasha’s pills.

L
et’s get this out of the way. When I married Peter, he helped me enroll in a debt-management program. The payments were obscene the first half year: fifteen hundred dollars a month. Plenty of people say they want to get their finances under control. Few people stick it out. Or rather, few people can. I have the statistics. That’s part of the welcoming package.

Also part of the welcoming package is a pamphlet all about food stamps and directions to the Angel Food Ministry warehouse on the South Side of Chicago. When I saw these things, when I opened the brochure and saw the words
Angel Food Ministry
, I went to the bathroom and vomited. Then I went to Peter.

“This is wrong,” I said. “You’ve signed me up for the wrong program.”

I held out the food stamp application.

He patted his knee, and I sat on his lap.

“I’m a good person,” I said. “I shouldn’t have this stuff.”

“That’s a fairly uninformed comment to make.”

“I just mean,” I said, “I was raised better than this.”

He kissed me on the cheek. “Fortunately,” he said, “you have me.” He took the pamphlets from my hands. “We don’t need these. We’re some of the lucky ones.” He tapped the pamphlet all about food stamps. “I don’t think you’d qualify anyway.”

I put my head on his shoulder. We’d been married less than a year. “I don’t feel lucky,” I said.

“You have no idea,” he said.

We stayed like that for a while. He stroked my hair. I closed my eyes and thought about how nice it might feel to be crying. But then I sat up. I looked him square in the face. “Peter,” I said. “Peter, you have to promise me one thing.”

“Anything,” he said. “Name it.”

“You can never tell Nell. Or Elliot. They’d disown me.”

“They wouldn’t,” he said.

“They’d be mortified.”

“Plenty of people go into debt,” he said. “You should be proud of yourself for getting a handle on it.”

But I wasn’t raised to be plenty of people. I was raised to be a Pulaski.

“Promise me,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Done.”

S
O
I
JOINED THE PROGRAM
and made it through the first six months, paying $750 every two weeks, which was essentially three quarters of my total monthly paycheck. This left me a little less than a hundred dollars a week to spend on gas and the occasional lunch out. Peter covered groceries, the mortgage, the cars, the insurance, the phones, the power, the gas. Everything.

After half a year, the installment was cut back to a thousand a month. But by then my school loans had come due (three hundred dollars a month), plus there were the back taxes (a hundred dollars a month).

Which brings us to where I am now: the balance left on the credit cards is seven thousand. Keep in mind, I once owed forty-eight thousand. Forty-eight to seven! The back taxes are a little higher—eleven grand—but the interest is so much better. Provided I never screw up again and I pay all my future quarterlies on time, the IRS shouldn’t inhibit me too much once the credit cards are finally paid off. As far as school debt goes: everyone has school debt. Everyone pays a few hundred toward their education each month. (As long as we’re talking turkey, I now pay $186, having talked them down from the original $300.) So it’s not like I’m a pariah for that. In fact, I probably owe less than a lot of people.

The conflict—the tangling up or the
noument
, as I would point out to my students—is the next ten months. My last biweekly paycheck before fall semester arrives next week: $1,050. The day after, $500 will automatically be withdrawn from my account. That leaves me two weeks and $550 before the next withdrawal. And in that time, if Peter and I actually split up, I am supposed to move out of my home, put a deposit on a rental, and find a summer job—summer job! What am I? Twenty?—that will cover not just my basic bills (food, board) but also my nonbasic bills (taxes, debt).

What all this boils down to: I’ve let my upbringing down. Plain and simple. I was raised thinking we had money, comfort. I was raised thinking that same money and comfort would filter naturally into my own bank account. I could blame my father for this—for his bad planning. But how do I account for Elliot and Nell? How do I account for the fact that they were able to make their own money and comfort? They lived up to their private school expectations. I did not.

The truth: In this country, money is everything. It’s freedom. It’s everywhere. Even when people aren’t talking about it, they’re talking about it. I’m not saying it’s happiness. But I’m also not saying it’s not. It’s the difference between sleeping at night and not sleeping at night. It’s the difference between a spontaneous dinner out and a freaked-out heartbeat because you might not have enough in your account to pay for all the groceries that are moving rapidly down the belt in the direction of the register.

Are you really saying that the person who has to put back a bunch of bananas in front of a line of strangers isn’t more likely to be depressed than the dude who pays twelve dollars for a glass of wine without a second thought? That the young woman who has two five-dollar bills in her pocket and fifty dollars in the bank isn’t more prone to sleep disorders than the dipshit who nonchalantly offers to help cover unexpected funeral costs?

Fat chance.