a short story by Marc Mitchell
Gordon peered into the open coffin at his wife
and felt hungry. It was a perverse reaction but every night for the past
thirty years--at 7:30 sharp--he had eaten dinner alongside this woman and
it was now 7:30 and there was his wife and the only things missing were
the TV trays, the parade of sitcoms and the four-course meals. And her
pulse, of course, but while sitting with her on the couch, both of their
greasy faces shining in the cadaverous glow of the television screen and
the sounds of chewing mixing with canned laughter, her pulse had not been
a vital element. At least so it had seemed to him then. But in retrospect,
perhaps the involuntary processes of his wife's body had been more important
than they appeared. Gordon looked more closely at his wife's waxen corpse
and thought about his own involuntary processes and grew even more hungry.
Vera died as she lived. Just as she had
stopped going to high school, stopped working as a waitress, stopped loving
her own children and stopped fulfilling her secret duty as a wife, she
simply stopped living. No explanation. One moment she asked Gordon for
the newspaper, the next moment she was flat on her back in the kitchen,
completely lifeless, without so much as a trickle of blood, a cry of pain,
a clutch to her chest, a relaxing sigh. For a while doctors pushed for
an autopsy but Gordon refused on philosophical grounds. Vera never let
people know what was going on inside her. Why start now?
For burial, Vera's sister selected a simple
subdued green dress that turned his wife's breasts into gently sloped hills
and laced itself along her stomach like a valley. Vera looked like a landscape;
her exposed skin, already stiff and translucent, was an odd shade of green
somewhere between seasickness and spinach, the dress a calm kelly, and
the silk lining of the coffin emerald. Since gardening was Gordon's passionate
hobby, between hunger pangs and evaluations of his heartbeats, breaths
and eye-blinks, he was seized with the desire to rush home and get his
spade and a packet of seeds. He wanted to crawl into Vera's coffin, plant
petunias and roses and lilies and daisies. It occurred to him that THAT,
too, was a perverse response and yet he was tired and could no longer restrain
the impulses seething in his subconscious. He let them bubble to the top.
One of these impulses was to fondle one
of Ms. Janet Frawley's ample breasts as she paused in her sultry progress
through the funeral parlor to view the body. Ms. Janet Frawley's days were
taken up by teaching and her nights were spent attending the visitations
of both acquaintances and strangers. She lived next door to the Earthly
Bounds Funeral Parlor and seemed to think of the gaudy neon and marble
edifice as a rather quiet night club. Each evening she ironed one of her
many black dresses, which ranged in tastes from severe to scandalous, made
herself a Martini and hobbled on spiked heels across her front yard to
the parlor, never spilling her drink. Once inside, she took stock of the
mourners and the mourned, paid her respects by draining the Martini glass
while standing beside the coffin--or urn in some cases--and then weaving
her way through the room to offer condolences. In her wake were usually
whispered inquiries of "Who was that?" but she never offered to introduce
herself. She was there to grieve, not to socialize.
Gordon knew Ms. Janet Frawley because she
had been his daughter's sixth grade teacher. Gordon was also well-acquainted
with Ms. Janet Frawley's breasts. Although he had never formally shaken
hands with them, he had admired them from afar. On the night of his wife's
visitation, Ms. Janet Frawley had selected--randomly but not inconsequentially--one
of her more racy black dresses with a neckline that did not plunge so much
as HURL itself from the shelf of her chest, and a hemline that retreated
like a defeated army from her advancing kneecaps. Not to mention the spiked
heels. Gordon loved spiked heels. He loved spiked heels so much he often
wore a pair when alone.
So Ms. Janet Frawley, Martini in hand,
touched his shoulder as she leaned over the open coffin, shaking her head
slowly. "She looks wonderful," Ms. Janet Frawley said, even though Gordon
still thought his dead wife looked like a swath of his backyard in need
of a nice rose garden. Daisies, maybe. Petunias. "When my Harry died,
he didn't look wonderful at all. He looked TOO dead." Ms. Janet Frawley
slipped in and out of accents depending on her mood. Tonight, perhaps inspired
by the pastoral greens of Vera's coffin and body, Ms. Janet Frawley affected
an Irish lilt.
After she drained her drink, she placed
the glass beside Vera. For the past ten years, anyone buried in Oakview
by the Earthly Bounds Funeral Parlor had been buried with a Martini glass,
the olive still impaled on a toothpick and balanced on the lip of the overturned
glass (those spending eternity in an urn were denied such a bonus). It
was Ms. Janet Frawley's way of offering solace to the departed and as she
leaned over the coffin to place the glass beside his wife, Gordon took
the opportunity to slip his left hand down the front of the revealing black
dress and lightly pinch Ms. Janet Frawley's right nipple. Which surprised
Ms. Janet Frawley enough for her to pluck the glass back out of the coffin
and smash it against Gordon's head.
Some time later, Gordon returned to the side of
the coffin with a bandage wrapped around his cranium. Blood seeped through
the bandage and blotted the gauze on the left side of his head, and tufts
of greying hair stuck out all around so that he looked like a well-dressed,
wounded koala. He had found a vending machine in the staff lounge, where
the funeral director had taken him to tend to the cuts in his scalp, and
was munching on Doritos when his daughter marched into the parlor. There
were many loiterers sitting in fat chairs and bulging leather couches and
standing in black knots surrounded by obscene flower arrangements and boxes
of Kleenex, and Dorothy pushed her way through the crowd to her father.
Dorothy was twenty-two and on leave from the Marines for only three days.
"How'd she die?" she asked Gordon, tossing
her shaven head in the general direction of Vera. "Heart attack?"
"We don't know how she died," Gordon mumbled.
He was trying to hold in his Dorito-scented breath because he was aware
of how badly the chips smelled. The entire room stank of hyper-fragrant
flowers and Doritos and cotton candy perfume and men who used too much
cologne to ineffectively mask the fact that their suits reeked of moth
balls.
"I bet it was a heart attack. Jeez, she's
GREEN." Dorothy was now propped up on her elbows on the side of her dead
mother's coffin, her dense hands dangling over the lush valley of Vera's
midsection. "Who picked out that DRESS? She looks like a stick of plutonium."
"I was thinking she looked like a spot
in our backyard," Gordon countered. "That spot over near the fountain where
we were going to plant roses."
Dorothy jabbed a hand into his Doritos
bag and yanked out a crushed handful. With her other hand she rubbed across
Vera's face. "Yup," she said. "Stone cold." Dorothy popped the handful
of Doritos into her gaping mouth and stalked off in search of the vending
machine.
Meanwhile, Ms. Janet Frawley had struck
up a conversation with Vera's sister, Mattie. Mattie was several years
older than anyone could guess, and unable to distinguish the color red
from the color green. It was not widely known that Mattie was colorblind,
which explained the perplexed expression on Ms. Janet Frawley's face as
Mattie commented on the rosy complexion of Vera's grass-green cheeks.
"I loved my sister," Mattie insisted. "We
had our ups and downs, what sisters don't? But when I heard she passed,
I flew in immediately and took care of all the arrangements. Gordon is
an ass, he wouldn't have known what to do. It fell to me to pick out her
make-up and her clothes and the casket. I told them I didn't care if the
color was inappropriate for a funeral--red was always her favorite color.
They were shocked but did as I asked."
Ms. Janet Frawley was beginning to wish
she had another Martini. Her right nipple still hurt from the lecherous
pinch Gordon had given it and she absently rubbed it through the sheer
fabric of her black dress. Many of the men found themselves staring raptly
at Ms. Janet Frawley as she did this; Gordon, however, was no longer interested
in the teacher OR her breasts. He was picturing the bursts of bright colors
the flowers he wanted to plant into his dead wife would produce come springtime.
He slipped out of the Earthly Bounds Funeral Parlor to go home and get
his spade and a packet of seeds. While at home, he might even take the
time to make himself a sandwich.