Once again, Marnie and Jon had traveled light, not even bringing spouses. They knew the drill and booked adjoining hotel rooms on-line - at the bereavement rate – in the same motel as before. The Standish was one notch up from no-frills. But with the Wake, the Mass, the burial, and then everyone to see and kiss, how much time would they spend in the rooms anyway?
At fifty seven, their old friend Gary Lassiter had looked so fit he seemed headed for a hundred. His sudden demise cast family and friends into numb surprise, and now threw them into the hard chill of a long graveside ceremony. Pushing its way into the cemetery was a mean wind straight from the heart of the Arctic. It snarled at the priest’s every word, stole hats and turned lips and fingers blue. But late in the day the scene shifted to a softer, warmer venue. The Bellington Country Club. Enticing the mourners was a long table bearing minted lamb chops. And creamed potatoes with truffle specks black as coal.
Just seeing the crystal and candelabra ignited Marnie’s chatty side. She had endured enough long faces and was ready to sip and snipe. Jon was more fretful. Post-mortem patter and chatter disturbed him. Worse, this all felt like something he and his older sister were starting to learn by heart.
“Why,” Marnie asked, “is there always a priest at these things? The Mass was hours ago.”
“Priests need to eat too, you know.”
This time, Marnie let Jon have the last word. But only because she was famished.
Mouth filled with pink lamb, Marnie turned and feasted her eyes on the table’s far end. Tracy Lassiter seemed to be bearing up, as expected. And if she ever foundered, as was not expected, Father Oscar was there at her side, cool and strong as a steel beam. The kind that supported new wings on sacred buildings, she said to herself.
When Marnie had heard about Gary, she sank into a bleak and even meditative few minutes. But then she bounced up and began planning outfits, convinced the Lassiters’ dinner would surpass the Fortiers’ dinner. (Beth Fortier had gone to her rest early too, even earlier than Gary Lassiter did, but her case surprised no one; the writing had been on the wall of her room at the Bellington Hospital ICU.)
As the funeral day unfolded, Marnie did her best to be solemn and discreet. In her own mind she was no less subdued than the long, slow line of cars, headlights ablaze in the pronounced November murk. But that was then, out in the wind; and this was now, here in the glow. And from the moment they entered the club she didn’t exactly walk so much as prance. Over at the coat-check by the dining room she went and grabbed Jon by the sleeve, same as she did ages ago – when she was hauling him out of trees or into the latticed outdoor shower. Now as then, she started tooting her old brass horn about being right again. Or smarter. On any subject whatever.
And she kept at it.
“Same old club, new caterer,” she burbled, while tearing a piece of her skinny brother’s (pre-anorexic, she called him) untouched dinner roll. “It makes all the difference. What did you think of the shrimp bisque?”
“Please!” Jon said in a stage whisper, a rasp deep with gravitas. “You almost wiped my tie in the gravy. Can’t you contain your glee over the food? This isn’t about how many stars the chef gets.”
“Oh you like it too. Come on. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying food at a time like this. That’s what these meals are for. To relieve the gloom.”
“This is our life, Marnie. I used to swim laps with Gary. Right there – right outside the window you have your back to.”
Marnie could almost see the old yearbook pages scrolling inside her brother’s head. Talk about gloom that needed relieving.
“They keep telling you about everybody living longer and longer,” Jon went on. “Plenty of people drop dead at fifty plus, though.”
From across the floral arrangement came a lupine sigh, deep and old. Gary’s aunt Florence, eighty nine. Her son James, who’d once freestyled the club pool right along with Jon and Gary, had heard the comment as well. “You’re so right, Jon,” he said, and stared into his Cabernet and beyond it.
This being a repeating occasion, a pattern had clearly developed. Marnie liked to sit next to her brother – and at as far a distance as possible from the truly bereaved: the spouse and offspring. With each death and each trip she – and he too, despite his dyspeptic pieties - was getting more adept at the diplomacy of where they should sit and next to whom.
If they became bored with each other, even for a moment, there were copious other mourners to talk to. But mutual boredom had never been a problem for Marnie and Jon. From all appearances, it never would be.
On days such as this the club always had to haul out its longest tables and extra silver. Big families had always been the rule in Bellington; and the rule still held for the Bellington natives they had known growing up, the ones who stayed in town and became lifelong residents and permanent club members, as had their parents before them. Why they stayed was another matter - not answerable, not logically. Bellington was the hole in the Bay State doughnut, the empty, unemployed center of a munificent Commonwealth.
Marnie, however, had escaped. So had Jon. She’d fled to the coastal end of the state, Arlington, Mass., and assertively planned her family to fit a four-bedroom home. (Tubes tied at two.) Jon had run in the opposite direction and become a dentist in the genteel hills of Lenox, where he married late – to a woman whose children had grown and gone. And there was talk – a phone call here, an email there – that the woman had grown and gone too. Leaving Jon standing all day in his office, having one-way conversations with patients muffled by rubber dams.
But the stories of the deceased comrades were different.
In the fecund Bellington tradition, Gary Lassiter had stayed to carry on the Lassiter Budweiser distributorship and wound up the dad of six. While Beth Fortier, a Bellingtonian who ventured into Boston or out to Lenox about as often as she flew to Peking, found herself the mom of four. These two were preceded in death by Harold Armitage, the native-son pole vaulter who’d landed inches short of the Olympics. He departed Bellington two months shy of sixty – survived by a brood of seven. All of the funerals had occurred in a space of fourteen months. But as they left St. Anne’s cemetery, Denise LePonte, the Board of Health secretary, assured Marnie and Jon that the longevity odds were way in their favor. As she put it, the three-death domino sequence was a fluke, not the first strike of a scourge erasing the town’s sons and daughters. Gary, Beth and Harold had only been statistical blips in the Great Bell Curve of Bellington.
“Make you a bet we won’t see you two back here again for a couple of decades,” Denise said.
Judging from the scattered evidence, Marnie wasn’t the only ravenous mourner in attendance. The truffled potatoes proved popular, the chops even more so. The plates, and even the tablecloth, were strewn with bones. At a signal from the club manager, white-shirted busboys cleared the remains. The manager signaled again and white-jacketed waiters rolled in two dessert carts.
Marnie gleefully steered Jon to the profiteroles, but he ate his as though it were a punishment. Baked in castor oil.
“Stop scraping off the crust,” she lectured. You already look like a scarecrow.”
“The priest is looking,” he shushed. “Now will you calm down?”
“Why do all you health freaks look like asylum inmates? Nothing is fun anymore.”
Father Oscar’s glare had succeeded in making Marnie’s face red and her voice slightly lower, but her mouth was still in rapid motion. “I see people like you stalking the aisles at Whole Foods in Cambridge,” she declared to Jon. “None of them ever smile. They’re not even looking at the food. They’re all reading labels.”
The piece of profiterole on Marnie’s dessert fork was six times the size of her brother’s, but she downed it, undaunted. “I know,” she said. “Death is stalking. You don’t want to wind up like Gary. But that’s not the way to do it, Jon – making yourself into a skeleton.”
“Be happy. Right, Marnie?” The interrupter was the retired Bellingham Chief of Police, Harry Shannon, who was in the chair at her immediate left, and sitting exceedingly close. He had found a second career with Edward Jones Investments, but lost in a recent bid for mayor. And decades ago he had lost in his bid for Marnie. He was still aghast that the winner had been a professor who bicycled each day from the hills of Arlington to the Harvard Yard, a bookworm from another hemisphere named Carlos Azevedo, who had skin like a ginger snap.
The late afternoon meal stretched into the middle of the evening, increasingly disconnecting itself from its austere purpose. At the point where there were no dishes left on the table – only glasses and cups – the widow, the priest, and the surfeit of offspring and offspring of offspring, rose and straggled away, back to their black cars. Watching the slow exit of Tracy Lassiter and Father Oscar, Jon had an instant’s vision of a stricken English queen being consoled by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The experience felt slightly hallucinatory, so he proceeded to drop the wine and switch to Diet Cokes. But Marnie went in the opposite direction, shifting into the higher gear of Remy Martin – as much to wrap her fingers around the fat, dazzling snifter as to drink the brown liquid.
Drinking any brown alcohol could flip Marnie’s mind back to the codeine-laced cough syrup of years ago, the one her pediatrician always prescribed when she and Jon traded mumps and measles and chicken pox.
As more refills were poured, they watched Harry the Police Chief lumber up to the coat-check and disappear around the corner –and, eventually, one by one and two by two, every other attendee followed the same path. Then the pair of them sat there by themselves like old hands closing the club, Marnie with her ritzy-titzy snifter and Jon with his straw and ice and foodless Coke. The busboys and waiters cleaned up around them and stacked chairs against the wall.
“Harry’s got you under surveillance. Better watch your step,” Jon said.
“Once a cop always a cop. Now why do you do that with your straw?”
“Why do I do what?”
“Make sucking sounds with the ice.”
“I don’t make sucking sounds. Look, they’re starting to shut down the lights.”
She had lied to him, lied to her brother, but it was just a minor lie. It wasn’t the sucking sounds that got to her and lit her up, not really. It was something else – that he hung onto that straw at all. And for so long. In fact, it was exactly what Jon used to do so many years ago, and she remembered him doing it in the kitchen and at lunch counters and in grade school - her little brother slurping his chocolate milk, drilling away with his straw after the glass was drained dry. Even then he managed to make the straw seem like a pacifier. But had he ever changed, outgrown it? What amazed her was he had never noticed he hadn’t changed. But she noticed. With each sip of Remy Martin her eyes sharpened, until they were x-ray eyes, peering ever deeper into her brother’s soul.
“Time to go. Come on,” Marnie said. “I have big plans for us tomorrow.”
Jon had no comment. Now that they were alone, he seemed less peevish. He looked up at her and turned the corners of his mouth slightly upwards, forming a daffy half-smile. Then he drilled at his glass, taking a long, burbling pull on his straw.
Like a parade marshal, Marnie led the way and they walked out.
Back in the Standish, Marnie’s heart raced the whole time she dressed for bed. She knew she would be chasing sleep past storefronts shuttered long ago and across meadows now smothered under asphalt. The creaky adjoining door did little to mute her brother’s ablutions. She heard a suitcase unzip, a drawer open, a faucet turn on, and loudest of all, she heard Jon gargling. It came back to her that he had been an obsessive gargler always - ages before he had ever given one thought to any endeavor as adult as dental school. She pictured him with the old mouthwash bottle, red Lavoris, swigging and throwing his head back, barely tall enough to see himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. At that point in time she had towered over him, and for the merest moment, a loopy Remy Martin moment - she felt if she were to push through the adjoining door she would find herself towering over him again. And of course it was right that she was too worked up to sleep; right that he would likely drop off at once. How many times had she babysat him in the ghost-glow of the console TV while their parents danced at the club?
Over breakfast, Marnie came up with a game. She got Jon to play quiz show - he the contestant and she the host - speculating over which Bellingtonian would fall to the reaper next, and when it would be.
More than once he said, “Think it will be one of us? We’re getting up there.”
Each time she answered with a bold swallow of coffee and a mountainous forkful of blueberry pancakes. She shoveled the mass resolutely into her mouth and found it extra delectable. It occurred to her that she had never woken up so refreshed after so little sleep.
Her plan was to take her car, not his. To get behind the wheel and drive and drive all morning, up and down the old streets, and then tool in for lunch at the Burger Belle, one of the last original car-hop places on earth, heralded in gift books and on Food TV. Her menu choice would be the Flying Saucer with extra cheese, the greasiest of them all. Her very favorite treat after field hockey practice.
Would Jon whine? So what, she thought – don’t little brothers always whine? But a little Flying Saucer grease might give them both some color. It might even shrink a forehead wrinkle or two.
She flipped open her little makeup mirror and immediately liked what she saw in the glass. The plumpness included. Of all the genes that had been given out in Bellington, she thought, the ones that had gone her way weren’t bad at all. In fact, they were to be valued, even celebrated. Most of all, she enjoyed the sense that last night and this morning the great river of time seemed to be surging in reverse.
“Are you aware you have orange juice on your chin?” As Marnie spoke – in a tone as bossy as a teacher’s – she gave Jon a vintage big-sister frown.
She reached across at him with the paper breakfast napkin and wiped it, boldly, before he could yank his head back. She couldn’t wait to get him to the Burger Belle, and see him with his skinny face plunked over a big chocolate milk shake. Sucking his straw.
In fact, it was right after their last bite at the Burger Belle that Jon first said it, the S word, dismally remarking that no members of the old crowd had died by their own hands yet. For all the two of them knew, he said, now in his very worst whining voice, Bellington would soon be visited by a string of suicides, which would make the funerals even more depressing. Before he even finished the sentence, Marnie had her palm pressed over his lips, the old five-finger gag she used to use on him all the time. “Now you listen to this,” she said, “and I’m not making this up.”
She lurched into her anecdote with so much gusto it was as though the Remy Martin was still swirling in her veins, surging back, like a storm reversing course over the ocean to re-attack the shore. “There was this man, and I’m not kidding, who wanted to do it so badly he did it three different ways at once. He went to a cliff overlooking the ocean where there was a tree. He swung a rope over the tree and tied a noose around his neck. He’d brought a gun too, stuck in his belt. He also had a can of kerosene, and he doused himself all over. Then he flicked a cigarette lighter on the cuffs of his pants and, in the same instant, jumped off the cliff and shot himself in the head – except the bullet just missed his head and hit the rope instead. The rope split in two, the man plunged straight into the ocean, the flames went out, and, like it or not, that sad soul lived to a ripe old age.”
Her brother listened and said nothing, not a word. The new look in his face – he was positively salivating – told her he may well have not even heard a syllable of her story. Abruptly, he waved over the car hop and ordered another Flying Saucer, which he devoured in savage bites. And when he finished he ordered one more for the road, to which Marnie whooped in approval. They returned to The Standish, as usual, and went their separate ways. Not quite a year later, they called Marnie with the news that Jon, with a deft self-application of dental anesthesia, had taken himself out in a flash – and they wondered if she cared to contribute some sisterly insights to his obituary.
The wind that gusted around Jon’s graveside was the kind that hurt the teeth of any mouth that opened to talk – so the speeches were muffled and the prayers were efficient. From the moment Jon died, the widow’s role had been a question mark. As suspected, the official widow was significantly elsewhere – on a North African odyssey with a Springfield endondist. Nothing could convince her to choose the cemetery over the desert, so the role defaulted to Marnie. For solace, she had the strongest of pillars on either side – her husband, the professor, and Father Oscar, the consummate professional of lugubrious occasions. Except to Marnie, they weren’t pillars so much as posts.
The day unfolded according to a script Marnie knew by heart. The black cars proceeded at the pace of elephants, the club opened its venerable doors, and the staircase led them all to a space that was the welcome opposite of the windswept cemetery. Every corner of the hall was aflame with silver and crystal, the same dazzling deployment that, for Marnie, had always managed to outshine the most tear-filled eye.
But today she was in the Tracy Lassiter position, or at least she was supposed to be. In its own way, sitting at the head of the richly laden table felt more punishing than standing in the gale by the coffin. She felt mercilessly pelted with condolences, the earnest homilies of friends and relatives touching and kissing her at every turn. Mid-way through the roast, which was a monument of beef drenched in port and lingonberries, she grew severely bloated. And not in her stomach, because she had one of iron, but in her brain. It was there that the speeches of sympathy landed and sank like hard, heavy stones, and the hardness of them gave her a thundering headache. She didn’t want to hear another word about her grief and her loss. This prattle was beside the point. What mattered was that she was in the wrong seat next to the wrong people. Where she belonged was down the end with Jon, as always. She couldn’t believe she was actually attending a Bellington funeral without him to talk to. He was a brat, he was, and she wanted to wring his little neck.