I asked her how she was feeling. She shrugged, nothing more. As I slunk back toward the counter she said, “Make yourself a cup of tea, Jimmy.”
The name halted my steps. No one had called me Jimmy since high school, and I’d more or less forgotten that anyone ever had. Jamie was the name I’d given myself when I left home. (No one ever, ever, used the name on my birth certificate, James, though the stoners I hung out with in college liked to call me Rockford, after the TV detective played by the actor whose name I shared.) When members of my family used Jimmy, I felt them clinging to a me who no longer existed. To Nana I would always be the boy racing up four flights of stairs to greet her.
I was starting to take off my coat, thinking about a nap, when Deirdre called from across the room, “Don’t get too comfortable.”
She was scanning a clipboard and repeatedly clicking the end of a ballpoint pen, snap-snap, snap-snap, a tic that pressed whiteness into the tip of her thumb. I noticed her manicured fingernails, maroon like her lipstick. She used to bite her nails, right down to the skin. “Follow me,” she said, waving toward the stairs, whisking me into the centripetal force of her plans.
The first task was to haul our father’s mattress off his bed. One, two, three, lift: The waft of urine, infection and medicinal powder, faint but unmistakable, spiraled into the air between us, and I felt bile bubble up from my travel-addled guts. “This is nothing,” Deirdre said, seeing the expression on my face. “You should have been here two weeks ago.”
Or two months ago, I imagined her thinking. Or two years. “I’m about five seconds away from puking up airplane food,” I said.
“One thing I’ve learned—you can get used to anything.” On her face I could see the toll of getting used to this: worry lines around her mouth and eyes, a tendony tightness to her neck. She was younger than me—she wasn’t yet thirty—but she’d started to look like my older sister.
We lugged the mattress, which was bowed at the center and blotchy with stains, out into the damp January air and wedged it into her minivan. It came to rest on top of the seat backs. “It’s kind of like a loft bed,” I wisecracked. “You might want to use it as a guest room.”
“Great, now I know where we can put you,” she said dryly. She was dangling the car keys in the air between us. “You remember how to get to the dump?”
“You’re kidding, right?” She was not kidding. “Isn’t there some service that can take this away?”
“Yeah, it’s called Big Brother’s Moving Company.” She pressed the keys into my palm.
“Don’t I have a say in this?”
“Not really.” Then, softening just a touch: “Please, Jamie. It’s your turn.”
Years ago I’d been part of the group that cleared out my friend Paul’s apartment after he died from AIDS, and his mattress was the very first thing we got rid of. Deirdre had put off this wretched task for two days, or three, whatever it had been, even with Nana living here and Andy around to lend muscle power. Why? Because it was my turn, my punishment? I knew how easy it was to slip into an argument with her; I wondered if she’d actually welcome it.
But I’d sworn to myself I’d get through this visit without incident. I took my place behind the wheel.
Coping with the smell was easy enough—I opened the windows, gladly enduring the cold air; I lit a cigarette and blew smoke across the dashboard—but the specter of my father wasting away on the mattress now bobbling behind my head was another matter entirely. He’d been a sturdy, almost stocky man—five feet eleven inches, nearly two hundred pounds—but illness would have shrunken him. Again I thought of Paul on the eve of his death, the skin-and-bones appearance; his shallow, dry breathing; the medicated glaze of his eyes as he held on longer than any of us thought he would, longer than we’d hoped was possible. My brain morphed them together, the friend I loved and the father I did not, until a sickly vision floated up behind me—the slate blue of my father’s eyes bulging out from a skeletal face, his cracked lips rasping out one of his characteristic truisms: Responsibility breeds respect. Respect comes from responsibility. Show me one, Jimmy, and I’ll show you the other. Even in death, a lecture.
My foot fell heavier on the gas, and I sped along the residential streets, gunning through a yellow light, honking at a slow-moving subcompact. I flipped the radio to an all-talk station and tried to lose myself in the angry pitch of political debate. Caller and host were arguing about whether or not Al Gore should distance himself from Bill Clinton in order to win the presidency. I joined in: Yes, distance yourself. Don’t get dragged down by the last guy’s mistakes. Be your own person!
At the dump I was the third minivan queued up. I killed the engine and watched one, then another, middle-aged woman extract a withered Christmas tree from her vehicle’s rear door, drag it across the frozen ground and, with a scattering of dead needles, heave the barky skeleton into an enormous gray compactor. It was all rather efficient, a timeworn January ritual at which I was some kind of interloper. When my turn came, I felt like the punch line to a comedy sketch: soccer mom, Christmas tree; soccer mom, Christmas tree; gay guy, dirty mattress.
I held my breath as I catapulted his death-bedding into the compactor’s jaws, grunting “Rest in peace” as it slipped from my sight. I was answered by an uprising of dust that hovered high above before disseminating on the wind, carrying toward me a last gasp of pine.
I wanted so badly to sleep, but when I got back to the house I was conscripted into other projects. First, the arranging, and frequent rearranging, of living room/dining room/family room furniture according to Deirdre’s orders, in anticipation of the visitors who would stop by after the wake the next night. Given the number of cobweb-caked folding chairs we dragged up from the basement and wiped clean, it seemed that she was expecting half of Greenlawn. Then we took the van to Big Savers, one of those enormous concrete warehouses where everything is sold extra-extra-jumbo size, a place so antithetical to the town’s Mom-and-Pop main street that it wiped away all my quaint illusions of Greenlawn. Here were the locals en masse—teenage employees speeding by on forklifts, overweight retirees in motorized wheelchairs, four-year-olds scurrying among the free samples as one mother after another shouted “Jacob, put that down” and “Emily, I said no.” I was glad we’d left AJ behind with Nana.
I straggled alongside Deirdre, who commandeered a shopping cart so large an average supermarket cart could have fit inside it. She loaded it up with restaurant-size packs of paper products, cases of carbonated soda, loaves of bread the sizes of roasting pans, boxes of shrink-wrapped guacamole, gallon jars of salsa and all manner of mass-produced snacks, each labeled to sound upscale: Mesquite Chips, Fancy Cookies, Four Cheese Tuscan Pizza.
“Could we maybe buy something besides junk food?” I finally asked, watching another chunky ten-year-old gobble up samples of Turkey Jerky.
“It’s just for people to nibble. Nana’s making a roast.” She handed me a laundry-detergent-size box of Gourmet Party Mix.
“Do you even know what’s in this?”
“AJ loves it. You gonna tell me how to feed my son?”
I put on a Big Savers mom-voice and wagged my finger: “Deirdre, I said no.”
She paused a moment. Was I joking? Was this worth a fight? “Some fruit would be good,” she said finally, returning the offending snack food to the mile-high shelves.
The quiet of the house started to spook me. I had moved my bags into a small room at the end of the upstairs hall that had once been where our mother sewed the clothes Dee and I wore as kids. I pictured Mom staring out the window into the backyard—the weedy lawn, overgrown bushes and tall evergreens—guiding inexpensive poly-cotton fabrics