Her: A Memoir (21 page)

*   *   *

The Unitarians were on a national retreat in the Midwest the week my sister died. It was nearly impossible to find someone to conduct a funeral service. I paged through the phone book and called each of the ministers to try to secure their services. I left messages on the congregations’ answering machines, but not a single message was returned. After several days, I was desperate and settled on our cousin Larry, a born-again minister at a church in Altamont. Larry agreed to hold a service but voiced his reservation. My sister was “unsaved and a junkie,” and “God wouldn’t look kindly on such a life.” My mother invited Larry to dinner. I dished some chicken out of a foil roasting pan onto a plate for him; three legs, a thigh, and potatoes. Larry ate hungrily. I poured him a glass of milk and gave him the program I’d written for Cara’s service.

“These are not God’s prayers,” he said and handed it back to me, grease spotting its top right corner. I’d included some Sufi scripture and readings from Shakespeare and Milton and Toni Morrison.

“What about our selection of music?” I served him seconds.

“I’m not familiar with it,” he said.

“It’s just a few things she liked.”

“Your sister died outside of God’s plan. Your service will be standard. A conservative eulogy should be given, mentioning your sister’s better qualities.” He drank his milk in one gulp. “You can feel free to ask some people to read some of the scripture I assign.”

*   *   *

Cara’s funeral procession gathered at DeMarco-Stone Funeral Home early in the morning. Devon was a pallbearer, along with two uncles, a family friend, and two first cousins. We sat in the rowed chairs at DeMarco-Stone and waited. Mourners filed down the aisle from the back of the viewing room and stopped at my sister’s body. Some of them walked past quickly, giving her a short nod, and then headed to their cars to line up for the procession. Others stopped and gazed down at her. They bowed their heads in prayer and looked as if they were trying to force themselves to remember how she looked, just as she was, in her coffin. The pallbearers stood at the back, hands crossed in front of them. Mom and I were the last of the mourners left in the room. I watched Mom hobble to Cara. Stooped and exhausted, Mom jutted her shoulders forward. Her long black hair fell in her face. Strands of hair caught in her mouth as she sobbed. She got to the pew and faltered, oblivious to others. She held a hanky.

Our uncle sprinted down the aisle with smelling salts. It seemed absurd to me that he’d brought them. Throughout the wake he’d passed me at my post and slid them out of his pocket, nudging me with his elbow. The salts were tied in a cheesecloth bundle. He showed Jedediah how to use them. “This might get ugly,” he’d said. “These women are likely to work themselves up into hysteria.” Jedediah intercepted my uncle on his dash with his salts. My husband was the barrier of sanity that separated my mother and me from our crazy family.

Mom looked at my sister and straightened the shawl Cara wore. “We’re never going to have more moments? Are we?” Mom looked up and opened her mouth to cry out; no sound came. She rested her forehead on the closed bottom of the casket lid and went back to her vigil. I knelt beside my mother, offered my shoulder to her; she held on to me.

I was the last to see Cara before we closed the lid of her coffin. I knelt down beside her. I clasped my hands. I wept. My tears fell on her face and made lines in her makeup. I saw my sister for what she was. My muse was a corpse. I felt her alive in myself, with all of her troubles.

I left her alone to be carried. I watched from the doorway. A drape that covered her casket was removed to expose a gurney. The funeral director unlocked the gurney’s wheels with his foot and pushed my sister’s casket down the aisle, toward the door where I was standing. The gurney creaked and moaned. They wheeled my sister to the door. The pallbearers knelt to shoulder the burden of her coffin. Some of her boyfriends stood alongside the hearse. In the back of the hearse, standing sprays, wreaths, and bouquets were assembled neatly around the casket. The undertaker plucked roses from an arrangement and handed them to mourners. A line of cars curved through the parking lot; Mazdas, Toyotas, Fords, and BMWs, all with orange funeral flags tied to their radio antennae.

We all made our way to the church. Larry gave Cara the eulogy he’d promised.

“I want to leave you with this thought,” Larry said at the end of his service. He stood at the front of the church, the mouth of the nave. “If Cara could speak to you now,” he said to the room of mourners he’d held captive with his sermon, “the one thing she’d want to tell you was that you must take Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior.”

The room gasped. I felt their eyes on me, both in pity and in plea. Jedediah squeezed my hand and I nodded to him, whispered that I was going to fix Larry’s wrong.

I stood up and walked to Larry’s lectern, asked if I could take the floor. He graciously gave it to me, allowed me my words.

“If Cara were here today,” I managed, though my voice was shaky, “she’d want to tell you that she hoped you could live each day of your life with joy.”

The room breathed a great sigh of relief.

“Cara wouldn’t want you to be sad that she’s dead,” I heard one boyfriend say to another outside of the church, after the service. They’d made friends in their shared pew. “She’d want you to be dancing.”

“She did that to you, too?” the other boyfriend answered. “She always had to be dancing. I hated that.”

“Did you take her out dancing, or what, man?” the first one asked, slightly competitive.

“You know I did.” The boyfriends slapped five.

They were wrong, of course: Cara would have wanted mourners to bang on the lid of her casket with their fists, a gospel choir singing in a minor key. Dancing was for weddings.

“What do you think she’d make of all of this?” one of the boyfriends asked and held a prayer card out in front of him. He’d taken it from a table at the entrance of the funeral home, after signing the guest book. He read the card and folded it into quarters, tucking it into his back pocket. I’d selected the Sufi prayer that she’d asked the entire congregation to recite, in unison, at her wedding. The front of the card was an image of a bright blue sky and rolling white clouds:

I offer you peace.

I offer you joy.

I offer you friendship.

I hear your needs.

I see your beauty.

Our wisdom comes from a higher source.

Our wisdom comes from a deeper source.

I honor that source in you.

Part II

Chapter 22

One night in late
November, five months after Cara had died, I got out of bed and went into the kitchen because I couldn’t sleep. Our cottage was dark except for glowing embers in the woodstove. The fire there, at the far end of the kitchen, needed stoking; it barely warmed the house. To the side of the stove, a drafty window whistled wind. I could see my neighbor’s darkened home. Everyone else in the world was sleeping. I knelt down and pressed my forehead against the floor, my face so close to the ground that I breathed in my exhalations. I listened to the sound of my breath over the hum of the refrigerator.

Jedediah refused to share our bed. In the summer and early autumn months after Cara died, I’d been unfaithful more than once, the first time with a man who said he loved me, the words I needed to hear. Although I didn’t reciprocate his sentiments, I gave him my body. The sensation of his hands on me was more of a sting than pleasure. It was the hurting I needed, the punishment for having allowed Cara to slip through my fingers.

As I crouched on the kitchen floor in the night, I heard a low tapping, the familiar sound of our house’s eaves settling in the cold. I looked up. Following the flicker of light from the woodstove along the length of the kitchen, I saw something. It was no further than six feet away, lodged firmly in a crack between the floorboards. I crawled toward it and pried it out: a pill. Covered in dirt, scratched where the writing with the identification code should have been. It was one of Cara’s. She must have left it behind.

I rolled it in the palm of my hand, put it on my tongue, and swallowed.

*   *   *

For Christmas break, my mother, Jedediah, and I took a trip to Hawaii. Cara had always wanted to go to Hawaii. It represented the “big vacation” for her—drink umbrellas and tide pools, flowers and rum, escape and rest. For me, Hawaii with its bright emerald sea would be like living in a giant antidepressant. On crystal shores, locked in on all sides by glittering ocean, silky sand, and frozen rum daiquiris, I’d be forced into a state of good feeling.

The Poipu coast of Kauai, I’d read, had the most swimmable waters of all the islands and the fewest sharks. The cost of the trip seemed reasonable, though an empty bank account worried me less than the prospect of spending the brutal gray winter weeks between semesters weeping in a psychiatrist’s chair.

Still, I packed bottles and bottles of pills.

I also packed a Ouija board, an antique designed by Elijah Bond in 1890 with block-lettered type of the alphabet and numbers and a creepy sun and stern-faced moon hovering over the simple answers: yes and no. The Ouija board’s paper was worn and peeling up from the slab of cedar on which it had been dry mounted. I laid the Ouija board flat on the bottom of my suitcase. Its planchette, carved from wood and embedded with a small magnifying glass that singled out the letters on the Ouija, had to be in perfect condition to glide across the board. I wrapped the triangular planchette in Cara’s favorite white flowing scarf: a scarf of fragile silk and muslin; a scarf that still smelled, distantly, faintly, like my sister; a scarf as dramatically long and easy to bow and drape as Isadora Duncan’s famed noose.

I’d been wearing that scarf everywhere and even slept with it on. I’d managed to fashion it into an accessory that went with all of my outfits. It tickled the flesh of my bare knees in summer and was dirtied with soot and ash from sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace in winter. It was filthy and ridiculous. It was as excessive and unnecessary as my three-week Pacific Island vacation. But it also worked well as a protective cover for the Ouija’s planchette, my earpiece to Cara, wrapping my direct and only line to her in her “energy.” Cara had insisted that belongings, especially clothing and jewelry, were the truest and fastest way to the dead. She’d said the dead missed their things and wished for them back; keeping the objects and making them yours would bring out the fight in a spirit. Cara said the dead would come sailing back into life to claim their possessions.

In Hawaii, my fingertips barely touched the planchette. According to the directions printed on the inside of the top of the game box, fingers should only brush the planchette and allow the spirit to whisk it across the board. This is how spirits talk. Also, two living people are needed for a séance, but I attempted to channel Cara by myself in Hawaii. I broke the rules of Ouija. I thought Cara might overlook my oversight and gift me with her grace. In Hawaii, I worked the board alone, in a back bedroom of the three-bedroom cabin we’d rented, while Jedediah and Mom made dinner. I lit candles and sat on the floor. If I heard someone coming, I’d blow out the flames and slide the board under the bed and appear to have been napping or reading a book. I asked Cara:

How do you feel about Jedediah?

He’s a coward.

How will I survive without you?

You’ll breathe.

Are you okay?

Yes, but I’m so sorry and stupid.

I thought my sister was egging me on to ruin my life and join her. I see now that she was after a different goal entirely, that she wanted something else, something better for me.

I told her all about my day, as I always had. I spelled out what was happening in my life:

Today I had a Mai Tai and cried, swam.

Last night I didn’t sleep. When I did, I dreamed of you.

Tomorrow, I will make photographs.

Once, Jedediah asked if I’d been talking to someone in the back bedroom. He’d heard me laughing but hadn’t wanted to intrude on a private conversation. I told him I’d only been talking to myself.

*   *   *

On Christmas Eve, Mom and Jedediah and I hiked the Nepali coast on the Kalalau Trail, the edge of a dormant volcano. The steep trail has been crudely cut through the rain forest. Its vegetation is lush, nothing short of magical. Banyan trees with hanging vines grow stout and wide along the path and down to the water; their roots weave in and out of the red-clay sandy soil like jungle snakes. Mom feared the edge of the path, the vertigo-inducing ledges that overlooked the sea. She hung to the side, while Jedediah and I stood as close to the edge as we could, looking down at a family of whales that had gathered not too far from shore. They floated and turned around each other.

I’d barely eaten that morning and afternoon, but I was beyond hunger. My stomach was so empty, had I had any food I would have been sick. So I moved up the mountain hungry, running on fumes, weaving back and forth and stumbling along. Jedediah’s hands were quick to reach out and steady me as I tripped over a rock or twisted my foot in a muddy hole. He took my picture when we reached the summit. I sat on the ground with my hair pulled back in a turban I’d fashioned from the white scarf, chin up to the sky, eyes closed, bony shoulders back and sun-speckled.

I’d heard there was a cove with a beach of volcanic rock on the other side of the summit, an hour or two hike down from where we sat. It was a sacred place where people honored their dead. We’d have to move quickly to make it before sunset.

My purse was a white Prada with studs, which I’d bought right after Cara died. Didn’t I deserve nice things if I was going to have to go through life feeling like I’d been sawed in two? In the Prada bag, I carried a museum of remembrance for Cara: her lipstick, hair clips, perfume, and a portion of her ashes were always there right beside my wallet, inhaler, and cell phone. The cap of the lipstick had come loose. Its bright red stain had smashed into the bag’s liner and melted from the Hawaiian heat.