Laura Kasischke - The Raising

Perry stopped in front of the two of them and said, “Nicole. Are you okay?”

It seemed to take her several seconds to realize she’d been spoken to, and then even longer for her eyes to focus on him. Finally, she hiccupped a little and said, “Oh, hi, Perry.”

“You want me to walk you back to the dorm?” he asked. “You’re looking like you need some help.”

“Get lost, man,” her frat guy said. “We’re doing just fine here.”

Nicole leaned into the guy’s arm, tripped on the heel of her shoe, giggling, and the guy caught her, propped her up on his shoulder again. She raised up her red plastic cup to Perry. “No, I’m doing great. But thanks for being such a Boy Scout,” she said, and the frat guy snorted, and Nicole stumbled away with him.

Perry had turned and watched them go, feeling uneasy, but what could he do?

At her funeral, in the photograph on her coffin, Nicole was wearing the dress Perry remembered from the Senior Class Awards Ceremony: pale blue with ruffles down the front. As she’d accepted the Ramsey Luke Scholarship with a little curtsy, that dress had shimmered under the gym lights. In the front pew of Trinity Lutheran Church in Bad Axe, as the funeral was coming to an end with weeping and prayers and organ music and the blowing of noses, Perry was thinking about that little curtsy—how it had infuriated him—and then Pastor Heine plucked the photo off the coffin and nodded at the pallbearers to come forward, to take Nicole Werner in her coffin out to the hearse that was waiting in the parking lot.

It was amazingly heavy, that coffin, even with the four of them balancing the weight of it between them. Perry was on the right side, at her head. As they passed down the aisle of the church, he stared in a straight line into the distance, having to work especially hard not to look at Nicole’s sisters, who were tossed together in the first pew in a dark lacy heap of blond grief, or to glance in the direction of his own mother, although he could feel her red eyes on the side of his face.

Then they were stepping out of the church and into that cold rain beyond the doors, and the ushers motioned for the mourners to move off the church steps in order to clear a path to the hearse. The crowd parted for the pallbearers and the coffin, and that’s when Perry saw the umbrella with the smiley faces. Maybe the other pallbearers saw it, too. They all hesitated at the same time at the top of the stairs, preparing for the precarious journey down. Nicole’s uncle—in the front, across the coffin from Perry—seemed to be having trouble bearing the weight and weeping uncontrollably at the same time, but they took the stairs one at a time, slowly, until, on the last one, Tony Werner, Nicole’s cousin and the guy who’d once punched Perry in the stomach for refusing to give him a ball on the playground, stumbled. Some salt had been thrown on the snow, but it had only made the cement slushier, more dangerous.

Nothing ridiculous happened, thank God. The other three pallbearers compensated by leaning backward, and Tony managed to regain his footing and get right back in sync with the others within a few seconds, and they crossed the parking lot and guided the coffin into the back of the hearse without further incident. Still, in those seconds, Perry had felt Nicole’s weight shift to his shoulder before settling down between them all again—and, now, he thought of that weight often.

On the other side of Bagels and Bites, he waited until he was sure Josie would be down the block, across the street, and then he turned around and headed back in the direction of his and Craig’s apartment.

The night Shelly had come across the accident, she had been on her way home from the gym. It was the Ides of March. All day, a watery sun had been trying to creep out from behind the same sloppy, gray, and borderless cloud until finally, giving up, it just sank into the horizon. Of course, then it cleared, and hard little stars blinked on one by one as the sky grew darker, and a huge round moon rose over everything, tremendously bright, as if it had somehow managed to finally push the sun out of the sky.

Et tu, Brute ?

It had seemed unfair that it had been such a cloudy dark day, only to be such a crystal clear night. By mid-March, Shelly was always weary of winter and its continuing, small injustices. She wanted spring.

Her arms and back ached. She’d overdone it again. Every night before she stepped foot in the gym, she told herself she wouldn’t overdo it, and then she’d start hauling the heaviest weights she could lift off the rack and over to the bench.

Why?

She wasn’t trying to impress the men, and there were almost never any women in the free weights corner of the gym.

She was, she supposed, trying to impress her own reflection in the mirror.

Often, she did.

Shelly was five feet, five inches tall and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, but when she yanked those forty-pound dumbbells off the floor, you could have counted the sinews in her biceps and triceps. You could have sketched the grainy fibers. She was a forty-eight-year-old woman made of muscle. “Whoa,” some guy would almost always say from the other side of the weight rack. “You a bodybuilder, or trying to scare somebody?”

Usually, Shelly said nothing in response, but once she said, trying to make it sound like a joke, “I have a past.”

She had sounded serious. The guy who’d been joking with her looked away, but a leering teenager on her other side said, “I bet you do.”

Shelly knew she looked her age, but that she also looked good. Her stomach was flat. Her legs were lean. Her skin was smooth and pale. Her hair was long and strawberry blonde. Boys like this one—chiseled body, face full of acne—had been staring at her body her whole life, although, these days, the older men left her alone. More experienced, probably they smelled it on her.

Lesbian.

She didn’t do men.

She wished she never had. She still had a scar that ran straight from her collarbone down to her hipbone, left over from the great heterosexual mistake of her life, and the last one of those she’d ever make.

Not that she was doing very well with women, either. The last woman she’d dated for more than a few weeks had moved to Arizona with the life partner she’d never bothered to tell Shelly she had.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Rosemary had said. But Rosemary had three teenage sons and a dashing brain-surgeon husband. It was easy for her to cast people out of Shelly’s life without a backward glance. Except to go to work, Shelly herself had hardly left the house for a month after the break-up.

And now, to top off a whole lifetime of sexual misadventures, it seemed that early menopause had arrived. A few weeks earlier, she had found herself stripping off her jacket and sweater in the checkout line of the grocery store. Dripping, panting. What the hell? Had they turned the heat up to three hundred degrees? Was the place on fire? She had a sudden nauseating memory of being placed by some beautician under a steaming plastic hood in a sweltering hair salon as a child, and being told to sit still as it poured stinking air from a hundred little holes onto her hair and the chemicals burned their way into the skin on her scalp.

“Jesus,” Shelly said in the grocery store, and the woman at the cash register said in a cigarette-husky Midwestern drawl, “Yer havin’ a hot flash darlin’. Ain’t ya ever had a hot flash before?”

No. She most certainly had not. But now she had one every other day. “Oh,” her doctor had said, “this is a little early, but might as well get it over with, right?” Shelly wondered if he’d say this to her someday when she came to him with a terminal illness.