Jennifer Longo - Six Feet Over It

Until I reach a line of flat headstones. Headstones with mistakes etched into them: misspelled names, wrong birth or death date. Wade, never one to waste good granite (or miss an opportunity to be regarded as clever), has taken all these “mistake stones” and laid them in a snaking path through our yard, straight to the front door of our house. He has demonstrated rare restraint in turning them text-side down. They gleam, cool and sleekly polished, and wind their way past more grave liners filled not with people but with soil and sprouting geraniums and marigolds, hearty annuals and perennials that don’t mind blooming in boxes normally found down in a grave with a casket nestled inside it, one more barrier between the body and the earth to which it is supposedly returning.

The headstone path, the grave liners in the garden—over the past four months Wade has continued to muddy the line between the graveyard and the house a little more every day. Because he thinks it is funny. Because death is hilarious. And I love it.

I WAS BORN DEAD. Or died shortly after—Meredith’s story changes depending on her audience and her mood. “The first thing Leigh did after she was born was die !” she loves bragging to people, working her well-worn “tragedy + more tragedy = comedy” routine. I have since learned from watching television medical dramas that while yes, I was born nearly three months early—a two and a half pound “micro preemie”—premature babies flatline all the time, and these days reviving them is really no big whoop. Wade says it’s just bravado masking Meredith’s injured maternal pride over how I subsequently lived— thrived —without the protection of her womb, but most parents wouldn’t drag that chestnut out for laughs. Makes me cringe.

“Oh, Leigh, ” she and Wade constantly moan. “Don’t be so dramatic, my God!”

If my eyes so much as mist up, get a little dewy over any thing—epic Wade and Meredith eye rolling. Sighs are heaved. A person lucky enough to be brought back from a birth/death and go on to enjoy freakishly perfect health has nothing to cry about.

They buy graveyards on the sly and perform stand-up comedy routines about their kid’s near death and I’m dramatic?

I don’t remember when I started calling them Wade and Meredith.

So here we are. I am. Non-selling days I walk home as fast as I can from school, step on every crack I see. No, living here is not technically Meredith’s fault; Wade bought the graveyard without even telling her, saw a classified ad— Graveyard for Sale —and signed mortgage papers she never even saw. But still—come on.

I keep my eyes down all the way to Sierrawood, through our out-of-control Gothic black wrought-iron entrance gates, yet another genius Wade idea. They’re just stupid. Every single time I step past them, I think, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…” and I’m in a Daphne du Maurier novel, alone behind the gates of a creepy estate coincidentally also presided over by a ridiculous man. Huh.

Just inside the Manderley gates, ducks paddle in a pond, beside which is a wooden sign, small and low to the ground, that reads: this is a non-endowment care facility. Non-endowment, according to Wade, means the families don’t pay extra into funds to maintain the graves; therefore everyone should be grateful he even gases up the mower and runs it at all. A little farther past the pond, another very small, carefully hand-printed sign reads: all flowers, artificial and real, will be removed on tuesdays to facilitate mowing. Which everyone knows is a big joke—people are figuring out pretty quickly that most of the signage around Sierrawood, like Wade himself, is all talk, no action. gates closed at dusk? If we remember. no music allowed? Tell that to Mrs. Irvin, who hauls a boom box over to J 72 in Peaceful Glen so she can blast the sound track of the Broadway show Carousel for her sister week after week. Even with Wade’s mower running and my headphones on, every Wednesday I can hear Shirley Jones hollering about having “a real nice clambake.”

With all my attention concentrated on the gravel road beneath my feet, I pretend the graves away. Most of the headstones are flat, so if I squint it’s just a house, just a nice house near a nice park, just a park. But on digging days the pretense dissolves as I run to the house, my heavy backpack beating me senseless, away from the backhoe and the pile of soil beside it, Jimmy the contracted grave digger leaning casually on his shovel.

But today is an office day, Wednesday, so I do not run. I trudge from school, moving especially slowly so that I miss Real Nice Clambake. She honks and waves on her way out as we pass through the Manderleys. In the office, I toss my backpack beneath the desk and shove the dusty stack of back issues of Mortuary Monthly magazine to the floor. (Why do we continue to get this thing? We’re not a mortuary! I’ve called them twice to cancel already.) This stupid brown cave. Tiny building beside the pond, the hills of graves rising all around it. There are windows on every wall, large and well-positioned for crow’s-nest-type spying, but the dark wood paneling, matted brown shag rug, and black vinyl wingback chairs seem to suck the light right out. Like the clientele aren’t depressed enough. The shag and walls are gummy with residual pipe smoke from the previous owner, who sat in here puffing for fifty-three years before selling Sierrawood to Wade and packing his pipe off to Maui. Who in the world who isn’t a British detective smokes a pipe? People who own graveyards, apparently. I bet he wore a monocle, too. The smell makes my head hurt.

I prop the door open and heave the ginormous English lit book we’ve been assigned to rest on the funeral-scheduling desk calendar.

The heartsick Ceres seeks her daughter / She searches every land, all waves and waters.

Okay. Here’s the thing about Ovid, about Metamorphoses : I do get it—Troy falls, Rome rises. The universal principal, nothing is permanent, everything changes, anything, any one you may have to hold on to, take comfort or care from, will leave. Die. Which is awesome. But then really, Ovid? You need fifteen books of narrative poetry to present this worn-out thesis? That I don’t get. Beauty for beauty’s sake, Mrs. McKinstry says, and we’re not reading all fifteen books, just the greatest hits, so count your blessings. Keep reading. She keeps quizzing.

Through the open windows I hear the sound of tires on the drive. My hands go damp— Not today, just let me sit here with Ovid, please oh please —and thank God it’s not a customer, just the flower van. Rivendell Nursery. They seem to be Sierrawood’s number one provider of beauty-queen-contestant-sashed wreaths. Mother. In Memoriam. Miss Sierrawood Hills. A lady brings them, and she also does weekly and monthly bouquets for out-of-town relatives and infirm or lazy local family members. Birthdays, holidays. Paying a stranger to visit your dearly departed seems sort of beside the point, but whatever.

The van passes the pond, and halfway up Poppy Hill the lady hops out wearing denim overalls; her hair is tied in a knot on top of her head and she lugs heavy baskets of uninspired calla lilies across the grass. But then someone else climbs out the back of the van.

Emily.

My only friend, left behind at the ocean. Months since I’ve seen her and I thought she was gone forever, but now here she is.