THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD by Yelizaveta P. Renfro

Every morning now is like falling – falling, falling – and as his mind tries to orient itself, tries to discover what has changed, the falling goes on for a long time. He falls past all the markers and mileposts of his life – shark-finned cars, babies in blue sailor caps, faulty pilot lights, potted ferns, sharpened yellow pencils in a terra-cotta mug, flagstone patios – until he is beyond the horizons of common life, until he is in black, empty space, and still he falls among the stars, faster and faster he falls, even though there is no gravity in space, and he waits, he waits for the impact that will interfere with his fall, he waits for the thing that will stop him. The terrible thing about falling is the final impact; the act of falling itself is relatively painless and even exhilarating. If a man jumps off the Empire State Building, does he think about the euphoria of falling or about what awaits him at the end?
This is not easy for him to wrap his mind around. He has known just one way of living for forty years, and now that way has been torn out from under him. No, not from under – but from the very center of his being. He looks down at his body and is surprised to find it whole, albeit worse for the wear of sixty-six years. The arthritis flares in his creaky left knee as he shifts position to get out of bed.
The other side of the bed is as vast and empty as airless space.
Here is the impact, then. This moment – when Norman looks across their sagging king-sized mattress to see Maddy. And Maddy is not there.
It is only his third such morning, but time has nothing to do with matters of love and death. He loved Maddy for the duration of a bright summer day, and she has been gone a long, gray decade, although Helen and the boys would tell you otherwise. They are too young to know.
Helen. Helen is coming this morning. That is the next thing he remembers – forces himself to remember, for it distracts his mind and gives him something to do. (He will not allow himself to think of the other, terrible thing yawning below him.) Prepare for Helen. He must match his socks and tuck in his shirttail and slick down his hair. He must not appear to be the disheveled and grieving old man that he is. He must make the bed and open the drapes to let in light and pretend that life goes on, even when he exists only on the peripheries, a ghost. He sags back on the bed, closes his eyes, and on the inside of his eyelids he can still see remnants of last night’s dream. Three nights of identical, geometric dreams – circles and lines, this is all. Translucent circles rimmed in black intersected by black lines. They move and shift; the lines penetrate the circles. The dream is meaningless. Perhaps there is something going wrong with his vision. He opens his eyes and sees the empty bed.
There is another thing he must attend to: Maddy’s dresses. Helen said yesterday that first thing this morning she would pack them up and send them off to the Salvation Army. She’s a brisk, no-nonsense girl, his Helen. A stockbroker in New York City. Maddy always thought that one day she would see Helen on the TV news when they showed the Stock Exchange floor; each night she sat forward in her seat and glared hard into the television, but she was never there. Even one glimpse of her, in her mannish pinstripe suit with broad shoulders, would have satisfied Maddy for life. He never told her that Helen was a broker, not a trader, and that meant she worked out of a posh Manhattan office, not on the Stock Exchange floor. It would have crushed Maddy to know there was no reason to watch the Business Report. She was easily crushed, not like Helen. Life has to go on, Dad. That’s what Helen said, and then she told him that they would be getting rid of the dresses today. And that she had talked to the boys, and they all decided that the best thing would be to pack him off on an extended visit to Charles and Barb and the kids in Austin. Best for who? Best for you, Dad. I’m only thinking of you. He has learned in the past few days that people with his best interests in mind usually have their own best interests in mind. The kids cannot bear to think of his rattling about the gloomy house alone. It will ease their consciences to know he is elsewhere, under the glare of a Texas sun, getting on with life.
You’ve lost your mother, he wants to tell them. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? How can you be so practical? How can you worry over airline tickets and funeral schedules and burial vault options? But the difference is this: for many years now, since the four of them left home one by one, Maddy had been pushed aside by college and careers and kids to the periphery of their lives. She was in the margins, in the wings. Occasionally she was expected to make a brief appearance on stage as a doting grandmother, a sympathetic sounding board. That is not at all the same thing.
Yesterday Helen tore through the house, collecting all of Maddy’s bric-a-brac, as she calls it. Bowls of potpourri, aromatic candles, sweetly scented bath bubbles – all the pastel and fragrant things Maddy collected over the years – and in one afternoon they were gathered into moving boxes and taken away. He was buffeted about the house, from one room to another, in the path of Helen’s frenzy. Helen is tall and narrow and scentless. She doesn’t have any interest in smelling like a woman.
His mind is somewhat scattered this morning. (But he will not let it wander to the crushing thought.) There is the matter at hand to be dealt with: Maddy’s dresses. He cannot allow Helen to take them away. They are all that remain of Maddy now.
He creaks open the door to the master bedroom closet (Maddy’s closet – she took it over years before, and he keeps his clothes in the small guest room closet), and here they are, her dresses, packed in two solid parallel rows. The smell crushes him. It is her smell – lavender cologne with a hint of nutmeg from her skin. It is her smell. It is her.
The dresses are all filmy, crêpey things in large flower patterns, the colors of Easter and spring. These are all she wore. She loved her dresses. He reaches for them, and the fabric flows through his fingers, gives so easily to the pressure of his hands. They flutter and sway when he lets go. They seem alive; Maddy’s flesh, in contrast, is stiff and unyielding now. The dresses are empty husks, ethereal cocoons, never again to be filled, but they are all he has. He will not let them go.
He pulls them from the hangers one by one, and they slide off easily and collapse in his arms, a tangle of spider webs. He carries an armload and piles it on the unmade bed. He goes back for another. He counts them as he goes along. Sixty-two dresses. A lifetime’s worth. Maddy never threw anything away. There are probably maternity dresses in the bunch, and maybe a poodle-dog skirt. He does not stop to look at each one; he cannot allow the individual memories to ambush him. (A glimpse of something yellow and peach – from Ben’s wedding? No, he will not remember.) When all of the dresses are on the bed, a mountain of textiles, he stops to think. He must hide the dresses somewhere. There are two things to consider.
One: The dresses must be out of sight and stashed in a place Helen will not think to look.
Two: He must seal them off, somehow, to preserve the smell. It will fade – he knows it will – and that nutmeg-lavender scent is all he has of Maddy. He closes his eyes and inhales, and it’s as though she’s here, somewhere; as though she’s only just left the room, leaving a trail of her perfume behind, and will be back in a moment. The longer he can preserve that scent the longer he will have her.
He could seal each dress hermetically in its own gallon-sized Ziploc bag, and then he could ration them out. Each month he would take a dress from his secret stash and crack the corner of the bag open, sniffing, sniffing hard. That would give him sixty-two months. Just over five years. And he could make them last even longer, perhaps. If some of the dresses don’t fit in Ziploc bags, he can wrap them in plastic wrap and seal them off with shipping tape. For the future.
But there is no time for that now. Helen will be here within the hour.
At the foot of the bed is an ancient wooden trunk, six feet long, five feet wide, four feet tall, which belonged to Maddy’s great-grandmother. Inside it are heavy woolen blankets and mothballs. The blankets are Maddy’s. In the winter she piled four and five blankets on top of herself before going to sleep at night. In the summer she used two or three. Then she would sweat profusely in her sleep, wake up parched and grumpy. But she had to have them, she said, for the weight. She needed the weight pressing down on her to sleep. I need the weight of the world holding me in place, she said. Otherwise she felt insubstantial. She said she was afraid of floating off in the night. An irrational fear from childhood, she admitted, with a giggle, but there it was.
He heaves open the chest and piles out the old blankets, the texture of steel-wool scouring pads, heavy like lead. They reek of moth balls, of poison, of death. He dumps them on the floor. The chest is empty.
He tumbles the dresses off the bed into the chest. They come up to the lip, and he tamps them down to put in more. He sits on top of the chest and shifts his weight around until it latches.
In the kitchen he finds large black trash bags under the sink. He goes back to the bedroom and finishes his work. As he is securing the twist-tie on the last bag, he hears a key in the door. Helen. He throws the bedspread over the bed in a haphazard fashion and yanks open the drapes, allowing the thin yellow light to spill in.
“Dad.” Helen strides into the room, planting her hands on her hips. “You aren’t even dressed. And you haven’t shaved.”
He looks out the window.
“We’re supposed to meet Mr. Schuld at the cemetery in thirty minutes,” she says.
“Look at those leaves,” he says, pointing at the oak in the yard. “See how they turned brown and shriveled up but never fell off the trees? It was such an unusual fall. I’ll always remember this fall.”
“Dad. Look. You’ve got to pull yourself together. I am leaving in precisely fifteen minutes, and you had better be ready to go by then, dressed and groomed.”
Ah, Helen, he thinks, my only girl, my youngest, where did you learn to say things like that? You certainly didn’t get it from your mother. (Don’t think it.) I suppose I find you a bit intimidating because you’re two inches taller than me and dress like a man. This is not at all what I thought having a daughter would be like. You were such an officious, scrawny mite, always bossing me and your mother and your older brothers around, and you were so cute we couldn’t help going along with it, and now – now look what it’s done to you. You believe you can boss anyone around; you believe you can have whatever you want. And you can and you do.
“All fall the storm clouds gathered in the east, black and roiling things, but it’s hardly rained at all. It was like a warning,” he continues. He has become the rambling foolish father. He is an actor, and this is his role.
“Don’t get superstitious on me, Dad. The weather had nothing to do with Mom.”
“I didn’t say it did.” (Right then the thing is so close he clenches his teeth to keep it at bay.)
“Whatever,” Helen says, showing her eye teeth. She looks nothing like her mother, who was small and roly-poly. Helen is tall and angular, her face a narrow blade. She takes after him.
“You get dressed, and I’ll get together Mom’s stuff. We can drop it off at the Salvation Army on the way home.”
“It’s all ready,” he replies, pointing to the neat line-up of black trash bags.
“What?” Helen has not anticipated this. She expected full incompetence and mild resistance.
“Everything that needs to go is ready to go.” He enunciates the words slowly, making sure he is not telling his daughter a lie.
She eyes him skeptically and strides to the closet, yanking open the door. The empty metal hangers jangle softly with the force.
“Well.” She is miffed.
“Now if you don’t mind, I’d like a little privacy to get dressed,” he says, gaining the upper hand. He is the father, she is the daughter again. The laws of the universe have been set right, momentarily.
“I’ll be in the living room.”
He hastily pulls on yesterday’s crumpled trousers and shirt, cinches his belt, and pats down his hair. He is ready for the cemetery.
“Dad, you look like a bum,” Helen says when he emerges from the bedroom, lugging two of the trash bags behind him. “But it’ll have to do. We’re already late. Let me help you with those.”
“I’ve got them.”
“No, I don’t want you straining yourself.” Helen takes the bags from him and heaves one over each shoulder. He is left with empty hands.
“You go get in the car, Dad. I’ll put these in the trunk, come back for the others, then we’ll be all ready to go.”
He mutely obeys. His daughter wants to leave him without any choice to make or action to perform. He is the quintessential bereaved husband. A perfect automaton of grief.
On the drive to the cemetery Helen chatters. Charles and Barb and the kids can’t be out until Tuesday, some work thing, you know, and Ben and Patty will be flying in tomorrow night, after an important meeting in Phoenix, and Rob is already on his way. Rob is up in the air, speeding along at hundreds of miles an hour, to come see his mother lowered into the ground. Rob will be here by nightfall. Helen has choreographed all of this – the complex arrivals and departures, the funeral service, the exact peach shade of satin coffin liner, the elimination of her mother’s clothes. What was the word they used now? Multitasking – yes, his brilliant, efficient multitasking daughter. Stop a minute, Helen, he wants to say. And cry.
“I’m tired,” he says, interrupting her endless plans. Plans for today and plans for tomorrow and plans for next week. Plans from now to eternity.
“I know, Dad. But the cemetery is the last thing. We made all the funeral home arrangements yesterday, so everything else is taken care of.”
They are silent awhile. He looks out the window at the trees, unwilling to relinquish their dead leaves. It is an ugly winter.
“Damn!” Helen exclaims. “I almost forgot!”
“What?”
“The funeral home – they need a dress for Mom. One of her nicer ones. I know – I’ll find one in the bags before I drop them off. Good thing I remembered.”
“No,” he says.
“No, what?”
“No, you can’t.”
“I can’t what?”
“You see, I – I already picked one out and set it aside. I left it at home.”
“You did?” Helen eyes him sideways, mistrustfully.
“Yes.”
“Which one?”
“The one with flowers on it.”
“Which one with flowers on it?”
“I don’t know. I’ll get it for you when we get back.”
“Fine,” she says, her mind already on another matter. “Oh, did I tell you, Mrs. Cunningham agreed to play the organ during the service. And I got confirmation from Pastor Hefferson.”
“That’s nice,” he says. “Your mother and I haven’t been to church in ten years, you know.”
“It’s still your church. And we have to have a service of some sort.”
“Do we?”
He watches Helen’s face; her eyebrows go up, in that half-surprised, half-irritated way.
“You’re being difficult,” she says.
“Just what does all of this – ” he makes a broad sweeping motion with his hands, encompassing the car and the trees and Helen’s plans and the torpid December morning, “– have to do with your mother?”
“What?”
“What does any of this have to do with your mother? Have you stopped to think about her for even a moment?”
“Dad, how could you say that? Somebody needs to think about these things. I came down here the minute I heard she was in the hospital; I was there when she went in for the surgery. I was there when she – when she didn’t make it.” A small animal sound comes from Helen’s throat – a sound he would have never associated with his daughter. “I was there. And I am here now. I am doing all of this.”
She stops and pounds the palm of her hand on the steering wheel. The unspoken accusation hangs between them – she was here, and her brothers were not. They were planning on coming, yes, but they were not here then, and they are not here now. Not yet. Helen waits for him to confirm or deny the accusation. She is waiting for him to take sides.
“Yes,” he finally says in a noncommittal way. He has the urge to defend his sons – they have their own lives, they leave him alone. He closes his eyes, and the dream shapes are back. A sea of circles and lines. He tries to force them to take on recognizable forms. Maybe his mind is trying to tell him something. He squints his eyes tight, and the lines attach themselves at the bottoms of the circles. They become balloons with tail strings, a whole sea of them floating off in the empty sky. He opens his eyes and looks at his daughter.
“Thelma Wandrie wants to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ at the service.” Helen’s voice is back to its regular pitch. She has regained her equilibrium.
“Who is Thelma Wandrie?” He is exasperated. Who are all these people who need to be involved in Maddy’s death?
“She was her bridge partner,” Helen explains.
“Oh.” The name does sound familiar, although he cannot recall ever meeting the woman.
“What do you think?”
“She can do whatever she wants.” He sees the funeral service for what it is – an elaborate ritual that must be endured. With every passing moment it has less and less to do with Maddy, who is receding, receding away from him. He will begin to forget things about her –  her giggle, her habit of shyly averting her eyes. He will have only the dresses. He must guard those dresses ferociously, with all that he has in him, from people like his daughter, who believe that life can go on. He wishes he knew the exact moment – that needle-point in time – when Maddy ceased to be. The world changed that moment, yet he felt nothing at all. He and Helen were sitting in the waiting area of the hospital, and then the doctor came. Something went wrong during surgery; Maddy was gone. She didn’t use those words, of course, but cloaked it in doctor language, and all he could think was that Maddy couldn’t be gone, not when he hadn’t felt anything, not when he didn’t know the moment she slipped from being. No great divide had opened in time. There was no rift between now with Maddy and now without her. Time passed on seamlessly, without a hitch.
“Dad, it’s like you don’t care.”
“I do care. Believe me, I care.” He raises his hand to his face as if to shield his eyes from light and leans heavily on the armrest.
They drive through the gates of the cemetery, and he looks over the rows of white slabs rising from the ground, each marking a life. Two flagpoles at the entrance display the national and state flags. Helen parks, and they get out of the car. The trees shiver, their sparse coverings of dead leaves rustling, and one of the flagpole lanyards clangs in the wind. This is the most desolate place he has ever been. He has the sensation again of falling, falling through his life like a trapeze artist who has missed his grip, only there is no safety net beneath him.
“That must be Mr. Schuld,” Helen says, and he looks up to see a young man in a gray suit striding towards them, deftly zigzagging through the headstones with a slight swagger in his walk. The expression on his face is carefully constructed: friendliness with a touch of sympathy, and underneath it, an ill-disguised avarice.
“You must be Mr. Collins and Miss Collins? I believe we spoke on the phone.” He offers his hand. Helen shakes it first, heartily like a man, and then Norman gives him his, a limp, useless thing. “I am Brian Schuld, cemetery manager. I’m sorry that we’re forced to meet under such unfortunate circumstances.” Brian Schuld’s face is stretched long and solemn.
“Let’s just get down to business,” says Helen. She is not impressed.
“First let me ask you a few questions. Now to begin with, were you interested in buying just one space today, or a pair?” Brian Schuld addresses the question to Helen, who is unmistakably the one in charge of this expedition, but he gives Norman a furtive glance when he says the word “pair.” He has his designs on Norman.
“I’m not sure we’ve thought that far ahead,” Helen replies cautiously.
“Because let me tell you, if Mr. Collins, your father, plans on being put next to your mother, then I would highly recommend buying the pair. Because you see, we cannot guarantee that the second space will be there, when the need for it arises, unless you purchase it now.”
“Yes. I see. How much are the spaces?”
“One thousand dollars apiece. At the time of burial there is an additional opening and closing fee, which is seven hundred. If you were to purchase both spaces today and pay the opening and closing on your mother’s site, the total would be twenty-seven hundred. And might I add that if you were to wait on the purchase of the second site, cost of spaces is scheduled to go up at the beginning of next year.”
“I would need to discuss it with my father, of course.” Helen glances in Norman’s direction. He is being spoken about as if he is not present. He is vanishing into thin air.
“Of course. And let me throw just one more thing out at you,” Brian Schuld continues. “Some families purchase entire lots or half lots for children as well. Lots are twelve spaces, half lots are six. Some people like to think ahead.”
“I don’t think we’ll be buying any spaces for the children,” Helen says firmly, “We are all quite young, and my brothers are married, and none of us live in the area. Now let me speak to my father alone for a few moments.”
“By all means.” Brian Schuld strolls off a distance, pausing now and then to straighten a vase or pluck at a flower arrangement.
“Dad, I think we should get spaces for you and Mom, side by side. So that it’s all settled.”
Norman shrugs. “That guy is a joker,” he says.
“That’s off the point.”
“Fine. Get two spaces if you want. I don’t care.”
Helen turns to walk back to Brian Schuld but hesitates and then turns back. She looks at Norman with a look he cannot fathom, and then, even though Helen looks nothing like Maddy, he is reminded again of the thing he has been squeezing out of his thoughts all day, for didn’t Maddy turn back and give him that very look three years ago?
The doctors say her heart killed her. But that is only the ostensible physical cause. There are a thousand causes for each death. They stretch back to the moment of conception, a filament as fine and tenacious as a spider’s web, every event connected to every other: the cigarette your mother may have smoked two weeks into her pregnancy, the seemingly innocuous fall from a tree at age six, the fast encounter with a stranger in the back of a car, that bit of inconsequential matter that just happens to lodge in an artery; a laugh that cuts you like a knife, a voice inside of you that tells you this is the end. There is a chain, stretching back to your origins, that spells your doom. Her heart killed her. Yes, but that is true of everyone, in the end.
Helen is walking away from Norman, and he is left alone, by the headstone of Janet Truman Corpenski, dead forty-three years. What can he know of this woman from the crooked white stone? Beloved Wife and Mother. Indeed. Mrs. Corpenski, a multi-celled organism, complex and vast as the universe, unique, one of a kind, and this is all there is to say. Distilled to her very essence on a tombstone, made generic. The dead are all the same. What else can be said of them? What can be said of Maddy? She was a soft woman – soft in body, soft in spirit. She devoted her life to bringing up their children. She was a little silly, prone to high-pitched giggling and telling bad jokes. She played bridge; she knitted and did macramé. The world would say that she was unremarkable in every way, but she was his Maddy. There is nothing that can be put on a headstone that will tell the world anything about her. Beloved Wife and Mother.
Helen is neither a wife nor a mother. Her headstone would read otherwise. Yet somehow, in her genetic code, or in the gaze Maddy directed on her when she was an infant, something has been passed down. A link between mother and daughter. A gaze Norman cannot comprehend.
That day when Maddy walked from the kitchen and looked back at him – that day he laughed at her. It was not meant to be cruel. She did not understand why he laughed. But after that day she changed. She became quieter, more subdued, dimmer. She seemed to shrink down. They say her heart killed her.
Helen is talking to Brian Schuld. They are framed between two oak trees, and for a moment Norman believes that they are strangers. He is alone.
Maddy was away playing bridge that day. He was home, washing up his lunch dishes at the sink. She came into the room and stood behind him; her presence was heavy, pivotal. He turned to her, soapy water dripping from his hands onto the floor. She chided him, then she giggled, nervously. She crossed her arms and tapped her foot. She had something to say.
“Dad!” Helen calls, motioning for him to come.
“I’ll be right there,” he calls back hoarsely, “I feel a little winded.” Old age is rife with excuses.
She told him he was using the wrong scrubber on the Teflon skillet; steel wool would ruin the delicate surface. She stopped. There was something more. He waited.
Fragments of words drift on the wind. “Development,” his daughter’s voice carries to him. “Columbarium,” Brian Schuld’s replies. The dead leaves rustle, the whisper of a muslin skirt.
I want to go to college. This was her big announcement. He stared back at his wife incredulously. College? Whatever would you do in college? Maddy planted her hands on her hips; she was on the defensive. I never got to go. I would take just a class or two to begin with. He coughed into his hand. The world spun out of control; his wife intended to leave him with the mysterious daily ritual of running the household for college. What does a 60-year-old woman want with college? He did not intend the remark to be deprecatory, but it was. Everyone’s gone but me. And that – that was the precise moment when he laughed.
A squirrel skitters by at his feet, clutching an acorn, running for its life. The dark clouds churn overhead, concocting something poisonous, something much worse than rain.
He laughed because what she said was true – everyone had gone to college but Maddy. He went, and the kids went, and two of the kids went to graduate school, and for all of those years they thought they’d never see the end of those tuition bills. And then one day they were home free – the kids were educated and everything was paid for. And it was this thought – that they were done, and here was yet another college education that needed to be paid for – that made him laugh. He was not laughing at her or her ambitions. No, no, not at all.
“Dad, it’s going to rain. We need to get this done!” Helen’s voice is thin and wispy, a cloud trail.
“I’m coming,” he says. The tears like seeds slip from his eyes. He will tell them it is the wind, if they ask.
He laughed. Maddy walked from the kitchen, throwing one final glance over her shoulder. Resignation – was that it? He couldn’t read it then. He can’t read it now.
He begins to trudge over to Helen and Brian Schuld.
He laughed, and Maddy never mentioned the idea again. That laugh is his point of impact, one among many. He falls through one stratosphere into the next, a man-shaped hole torn in the membrane of each. How far can a man fall?
“Mr. Schuld says there are two side-by-side spaces right here.” Helen points at the ground. “Not too close to the road, not too far from a big tree. What do you think?”
Norman shrugs. “This place seems as good as any.”
“Good. Let’s see, this is lot 432, sites seven and eight.” Brian Schuld makes a notation on his clipboard.
“This is rather like buying real estate. Will we get a deed?” Helen asks.
“You’ll get a certificate of interment rights, which is similar to a deed.”
Norman is buying real estate he doesn’t want. Lot 432, site seven. Maddy’s new address, her final address. Lot 432, site eight. His destination.
“Can two people be buried in one space?” Norman addresses his question to Brian Schuld.
“Well, not if you intend to do two casket burials. We do not do double-depth burials, if that is your question, Mr. Collins. It’s too difficult to get through the bedrock.”
“But is there any way at all to do two burials in one space?” he asks. The idea possesses him suddenly, and he cannot let it go. Anything to distract his mind, to slow the freefall.
“If one of the burials were to be a cremation burial, then we would allow two burials in one space, yes. In other words, we would bury an urn containing cremains at the foot of the casket.”
To be forever at Maddy’s feet in a state of supplication and grace – this is what he wants. This is precisely what he wants.
“But Dad’s not being cremated,” his practical daughter points out.
“No, Helen, that’s exactly what I want – to be buried at your mother’s feet in a little urn.”
“But dad, you never said anything about cremation before. Mom wasn’t cremated. You shouldn’t be either.”
“Why? Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Because we should treat you the same, that’s why.” Helen seems at a loss. She looks to Brian Schuld for help.
“But that’s what I want,” Norman says. “That’s exactly what I want. How does that compare in price to the other option, Mr. Schuld?”
Helen mutely shakes her head; he has disturbed in her some deep, innate sense of order. This is not how the world should be. Her parents lay side by side in a bed for forty years; they should continue to do so in death.
“Well, you would buy the space and a second right of interment, which would come to twelve hundred. Plus the seven hundred opening and closing. Grand total of nineteen hundred.” Brian Schuld gives the information reluctantly. He does not want to lose the sale of an additional site.
“That’s the way we’ll go, then,” Norman announces, and suddenly he finds balance, equilibrium. He has made a decision.
“Dad, don’t you want time to think about this?”
“No, I’m absolutely sure.”
“Well, in that case let’s walk over to the office and do up the paperwork,” Brian Schuld says. They follow behind.
The office is painted off-white with gold undertones, and the furniture has a cherry finish. He and Helen sink into heavily upholstered chairs, and Brian Schuld sits across from them behind the wide, smooth expanse of his cherry desk. He begins to type on a computer. Norman closes his eyes, and the recurring circle-and-line pattern floods his vision. It is a comfort now. He rolls his eyes back and forth behind his eyelids, and the lines begin to shiver and lash; they burrow into the circles. The genesis of life: spermatozoa and ova. At this moment – precisely right now – countless sperm are penetrating countless eggs. A miracle occurs every nanosecond, but none of it matters, none of it. Not one of those miracles is Maddy. He opens his eyes and stares at the reddish grain of Brian Schuld’s desk.
“Mr. Schuld, let’s say we change our mind about that second site and decide that we want it after all. Would it still be possible to come in and buy it, later this week?” Helen asks, splaying her long fingers on the desk.
“Of course, of course. It’s unlikely that we’ll sell that particular site in the next several days. And in fact,” Brian Schuld leans across the desk and locks his eyes on Helen’s, “although we don’t usually do this, I’m willing to put the site on an unofficial hold for a little while. Just this one time, for you.”
“Absolutely not,” Norman whispers fiercely. “I won’t hear of it. I’ve already decided, and that’s that. If a man can’t decide how he wants to be buried, then just what can he decide?”
“All right, Mr. Collins,” Brian Schuld consents gracefully, “I was just trying to be helpful.”
“You were just trying to make another sale.”
Brian Schuld coughs; Helen looks at the wall.
“You may not believe this, but I really do have your best interests at heart,” Brian Schuld announces.
Norman can’t stomach this, so he sits silently, staring into the grain of the wood, once a living tree, now sliced open and preserved with shellack. He signs several sheets of paper that he doesn’t bother to read. He writes a check. They get up to go.
“Thank you for your business. I want you to know I will do everything in my power to make Wednesday’s service go as smoothly as possible.” Brian Schuld shakes Norman’s hand, and then he turns to Helen.
“Miss Collins,” he says, “here is my card. If there is anything else I can help you with, please don’t hesitate to give me a call.”
Norman stumbles outside, his throat burning with anger. They are both going to betray him, he knows it. They’ll bury him in a grave beside Maddy in a matching coffin, and there won’t be a single thing he can do about it. He is powerless. It is so easy to betray the dead.
“Now that wasn’t so bad, was it, Dad?” Helen says lightly.
“I know what you’re going to do,” he replies. “I know there’s nothing I can do to stop you. But you could at least respect your father’s last wishes.” He begins to walk away from her, towards the car.
“Dad!” She rushes to catch up with him. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw that look that passed between the two of you, when he gave you his card. I know what you’re plotting.”
“Dad, nothing passed between us. You’ve had a rough few days, that’s all. We need to get you home so you can rest.”
“All I do is rest.”
They get in the car, and as Helen starts the engine it finally begins to rain. Big drops, the size of quarters, plop on the windshield.
On the drive back they are quiet. Occasionally Helen says something cheerful.
“I’m taking you to the Beijing Restaurant for dinner tonight, Dad.” Or, “I’ll get a cleaning lady to come in and do a thorough once-over of the entire house while you’re in Austin. We’ll get it painted.”
Norman wonders how difficult it is for her to keep manufacturing enthusiasm, to forever keep her mind pointed at the future, to keep all of her plans, her endless plans, inventoried. The raindrops have stopped falling. Overhead the black clouds are still swollen, tumescent. It will never really rain; the leaves will never fall.
“I’ll drop you at home before I swing by the Salvation Army,” she says, “Oh, and don’t forget I need that dress.”
“I’ll go in and get it and bring it out to you,” he replies.
“No need. I can come in and get it.”
“No,” he says firmly, “I’ll go in and get it and bring it out to you.”
“Fine,” she says, exasperated again by her delusional, stubborn father.
He thinks of the dresses cooped up in that musty trunk, and he wonders – will they smell of moth balls and wool when he pulls them out? Will Maddy’s scent be gone? And that thought sends him falling, careening through space again, and he wants to reach out and grab his daughter’s hand off the steering wheel, to stop the falling, or to bring her down with him.
“Helen.” His voice reaches out to her. He is a drowning man, grasping at a life preserver. He is speaking to her from another world.
“What is it, Dad?” She looks over at him, worry on her face.
“Did your mother ever tell you that she wanted to go to college?”
“Mom? To college? No. She never mentioned it. The thought never crossed my mind. She was just – Mom.” Helen’s voice cracks the last word in two – Mo-om.
“She told me once that she wanted to go, and I laughed at her.” He gasps the words out, confessing to his daughter.
“When did she tell you that?”
“Three years ago.”
“Three years ago? I thought you meant a long time ago. Why did she want to go to college three years ago?”
“And I laughed at her – did you hear me?”
“I heard you, Dad.”
“And she never went.”
“That’s not your fault, Dad. If she really wanted to do it she would have done it.”
It is a lie – an absolute, bald-faced lie. Maddy thought of others first; she did not do things for herself. She did not do things without the approval of her family – Norman’s approval, Helen’s approval. She was in absolute awe of Helen – her opposite, her tall, svelte, shrewd daughter, her alter ego. Oh Helen, Norman thinks, have we begun to lie about the dead already? It doesn’t take long. It doesn’t take long. We spin webs of deceit; we make the dead what we need them to be. We shape them in our own image. It is impossible to know anything about the dead. The moment they die we make them into something they never were.
“Dad, don’t dwell on it.” Helen stops the car in front of the house. “You sure you don’t want me to come in?”
“Yes.” It is the only thing he is sure about.
As he walks up the front walkway, edged with scalloped brick that Maddy carefully placed there twenty years before, he has a feeling that there is no ground under his feet, that he is treading water, or that he is still falling, although he appears to be a slightly stooped old man walking up to the front door of his house. All that we see is illusion, he thinks.
He stumbles through the hallway to the bedroom, where he opens the trunk and inhales deeply, praying for Maddy to be there. She is there. The mothballs have not driven her out. He plucks a dress from the top of the heap – a hyacinth and rose affair in crinkly fabric – and walks back to the front door. He must hand over one of his precious dresses to Helen. He is down to sixty-one.
“Dad, why did you pick this one?” Helen fingers the dress, frowning slightly.
“What’s the matter with it?”
“It’s a little lively for a funeral. Look at these colors.”
“All of your mother’s dresses were like that. And I think this was one of her favorites.”
“Well, OK. It’ll do. I have to run to drop off the rest of these clothes, then drop the dress at the funeral home. I’ll be back here this evening by five to take you out. OK, Dad?”
“Fine,” he says, but he is already walking back to the house. He remembers that he left the trunk open.
Back in the bedroom he looks down at the tumble of Maddy’s dresses and thrusts his hands in to feel the mélange of textures – cotton, crêpe, silk, acetate, rayon, satin. He pulls out a large armload and holds it to his nose, breathing deeply, deeply, until he is dizzy with longing. He lies down on the foot of the bed and drapes the dresses over himself. They are cool and heavy. He reaches in for more. And more. He is becoming drunk on their scent. He piles them all on top of himself, a mountain of Maddy’s dresses, with a little broken man buried underneath. Piling them still higher, he knows that he is allowing the scent to dissipate, he is squandering it on this one moment, he is not guarding it as he had vowed, but he doesn’t care. He wants all of Maddy, all that he can have of her, here and now. He wants the falling to stop; he wants to be secured, he wants the final impact. He piles the dresses up over his chest and legs until he is pinned into the bed, anchored, the weight of the world pressing down on him.


Yelizaveta P. Renfro has stories forthcoming in Glimmer Train and The North American Review.

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THE PRETTY PEOPLE DANCING by Gretchen Comba